


Worlds Apart

by QueenyMidas



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Muggle AU - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, F/F, F/M, Falling In Love, Gaming, Gen, M/M, Muggle AU, World of Warcraft - Freeform, muggle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:03:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenyMidas/pseuds/QueenyMidas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a muggle AU, Draco and Harry are left looking for magic in much more virtual places. For the both of them, the PC game World of Warcraft provides an outlet from their lives at school (where they’re both still nasty rivals). When their characters meet in game and a romance blossoms, it’s only a matter of time before they figure out who’s on the other side of the computer screen. You really don’t need to know anything about WoW to read this. Explicit in later chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Proudmoore

**Author's Note:**

> I repeat: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY WOW IN ORDER TO GET THIS. I understand that it’s a rare mixture of personalities to love both erotic gay Harry Potter fanfiction and online massive multi-player roleplaying games, so I shall lay down the basics.  
> There are only a few things you need to know before we dive in. One, in the continent of Azeroth (the mainland of WoW), there are two factions. One is the noble and valiant Alliance, the other the orcish and ruthless Horde. Two is that Harry plays a worgen paladin, which roughly translates to a werewolf holy warrior. They can heal and fight equally well, and the worgen (like humans, night elves, gnomes, dwarves, and draenei) are a part of the Alliance. Draco plays a blood elf mage, the equivalent of an annoying wizard twink. They can only deal damage/control minions and blood elves (like orcs, undead, tauren, goblins, and trolls) belong to the Horde.  
> The Horde and Alliance have been at war (hence the name of the game) with both each other and the evil in their realm. Other than that, the world is a free-for-all where each hero picks their own path.  
> For those of you who do play (this will not appear in English to people who don’t play), this is taking place in (I will be updating in real-time with the game, so you may see some of my own opinions on it in here haha) in Mists of Pandaria. I’m changing the fact that cross-faction characters cannot talk to one another so our boys can communicate. Also, I’m changing party systems so that for neutral content (LK, Deathwing, Mogushan Vaults) the Horde and Alliance toons can team up and they can trade. Also I made Proudmoore a pvp server, oops.  
> Okay, enough nerd talk. Onwards!

**Chapter 1: Proudmoore**

**AN:** I repeat: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY WOW IN ORDER TO GET THIS. I understand that it’s a rare mixture of personalities to love both erotic gay Harry Potter fanfiction and online massive multi-player roleplaying games, so I shall lay down the basics.

There are only a few things you need to know before we dive in. One, in the continent of Azeroth (the mainland of WoW), there are two factions. One is the noble and valiant Alliance, the other the orcish and ruthless Horde. Two is that Harry plays a worgen paladin, which roughly translates to a werewolf holy warrior. They can heal and fight equally well, and the worgen (like humans, night elves, gnomes, dwarves, and draenei) are a part of the Alliance. Draco plays a blood elf mage, the equivalent of an annoying wizard twink. They can only deal damage/control minions and blood elves (like orcs, undead, tauren, goblins, and trolls) belong to the Horde.

The Horde and Alliance have been at war (hence the name of the game) with both each other and the evil in their realm. Other than that, the world is a free-for-all where each hero picks their own path.

For those of you who do play (this will not appear in English to people who don’t play), this is taking place in (I will be updating in real-time with the game, so you may see some of my own opinions on it in here haha) in Mists of Pandaria. I’m changing the fact that cross-faction characters cannot talk to one another so our boys can communicate. Also, I’m changing party systems so that for neutral content (LK, Deathwing, Mogushan Vaults) the Horde and Alliance toons can team up and they can trade. Also I made Proudmoore a pvp server, oops.

Okay, enough nerd talk. Onwards!

xxxxx

   “Fucking fuck! You’re all incompetent,” Draco yelled at his computer screen. His mage made a dramatic noise as he fell to the ground, clasping his chest in death with the bodies of his comrades surrounding him.

   The raid chat immediately flooded with similar sentiments.

**[Raid] [Spader-Madoran]: dumbasses**

**[Raid] [Harcles-Dragonblight]: you have to fucking stack on the fucking people who have the fucking blue arrow on them. If you don’t, we all get hit with 70k damage.**

   There was far more wrong with this group of players than just some messed up mechanics (a healer had run off the platform and fell to their death, the tank had terrible damage-per-second rates, and Draco was the only one dispelling anything), but Draco supposed that was also true. With each patch there were instructions on the fights, but people never read the instructions. Of course not.

   This specific raid was on the Thunder King, in an Asian-inspired palace that held the secrets of lightning and thunder.

**[Raid] [Toomanyheals-Deathwing]: your all a bunch of faggots.**

   That was where Draco had to step in on the madness and remind everyone that they were playing a game. He refused to fight the evil constructs of the first titans that roamed Azeroth with homophobes.

**[Raid] [Dragonis-Proudmoore]: You wish you were a faggot. Just shut up and learn how to play.**

**[Raid] [Toomanyheals-Deathwing]: oooo u mad fag??**

**[Raid] [Axels-Frostmane]: i think the fag is mad**

**Dragonis has left the group.**

   Nothing in the world grated on Draco Malfoy like internet memes. They made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and run away. Sure, it may have started out as a few cute jokes in front of some pictures of animals, but the shitfest of misogyny, racism, ignorance, homophobia, and general stupidity it had evolved into thanks to every eleven year-old boy with internet access was downright malicious.

   “Fucking straight people.”

   Draco’s character reappeared in the town he had been questing in before he had queued in the raid-finder. Everyone from casual players to hardcore gamers used the raid-finder to assemble random groups of twenty-five that would work together to conquer a common enemy.

   In theory, the grizzled World of Warcraft heroes would come together from different servers (that gave them the name next to their username when in cross-server zones) and get along in peace and harmony against their foes. But unfortunately (or sometimes fortunately) each server had a reputation.  

   There were too many players (eleven million, actually) for there to be one central server, so there were hundreds. Each with its own strange quirks, like entering that server was playing in an entirely different game. They were all also named after items, people, or locations in the game. Dragonblight was full of assholes, Sporregar was full of freaks, Deathwing was full of new players, and Proudmoore was full of homos.

   It did have ‘proud’ in the name, after all.

   All the LGBTQ community on the game had banded together against their discrimination and picked one server to completely dominate. They had a celebratory pride parade in July where everyone got on horseback and ran through the continents in their skimpiest clothing. They had guilds for pansexuals, transsexuals, bears, drag queens, and every variation of the expanding queer community.

   Draco had been glad to join such an inclusive server when he began playing, and he had watched its community and economy grow. In the chat channel that was supposed to be used for Proudmoore trade, people argued over the sexuality of pop icons and debated worldwide issues.

   Sure, some kids on the server were still a special kind of Warcraft stupid—or hadn’t known they’d picked the queer server when they signed up for the game—but for the most part they were bearable human beings.

   Now that Draco and his lean blood elf were back into the server of the heteroflexible, he immediately felt safer in the game. If anyone called you a ‘fag’ in Proudmoore, it was most likely a compliment.

   Even with all that being said and done, Draco still had some pent-up anger to take out on some unsuspecting member of the opposite faction.

   Dragonis and his silvery blonde and decidedly virtual hair mounted his proto-drake, taking to the skies. The green dragon flapped its fearsome wings while Draco’s character rode on its back. Using his mouse, Draco could adjust his character’s view of the horizon. He searched the grasslands for some Alliance dog he could swarm when his eyes finally landed on one unlucky worgen.

   The wolf-creature seemed to be busy looking at its map, and when Draco’s dragon swooped in closer he could see that the worgen was a paladin. Pffft. Easy kill, especially if the bastard was in his healing gear. Damage output decreased significantly in the wrong set of armor.

   Dragonis flew off of the emerald dragon with a grand leap with a flurry of spells. Arcane explosion, frost nova, deep freeze, flamestrike—

   That was when the worgen seemed to realize he was the victim of Draco’s sneak attack. Whoever was controlling it had begun to defend themselves with healing and shielding spells before striking back to hit Draco.

   Ugh, that one move gave 20k damage out of the meager 370k health points that Draco had. Being a flimsy spell-caster was a rough life.

   Draco had thankfully gotten the upper hand when he attacked first.

**[Worgasm]: Fuck off.**

**[Dragonis]: Only after I kill you.**

   It seemed the battle lines were drawn. Just because they were virtual didn’t mean they made Harry any less enraged.

   There he was, trying to find some rare artifacts on his map, and he was blindsided by some Horde nut. That was the way of the Warcraft, but still.

   He fired every smiting holy spell he had at that slippery blood elf. The mage’s health declined as his did, but not nearly as fast. With a defeated shout, his werewolf crumpled to the ground in death. Fuck. Now he was going to have to spend some hard-earned gold on repairing his broken armor.

**[Dragonis]: Nice name, by the way. How early did you have to log on to get it?**

**[Worgasm]: Midnight on release date of the Cataclysm expansion pack. Also, fuck you.**

**[Dragonis]: Sucks to suck.**

   Harry, helpless to do anything about it, watched the blood elf hop back on his dragon and fly into the night sky. It was lucky for him that the concept death was only temporary in the virtual gaming world.

   He released his spirit from his corpse, effectively resurrecting himself after combat with less health and the power source for his spells (mana) than he’d had before dying. It’d take a few minutes to regenerate back to its full capacity.

   “Whatever.” Harry closed the game screen.

   He’d saved up for his own personal computer in his room after a summer of babysitting, lawn-mowing, dog-walking, and any other odd job he could scrape up. His aunt and uncle would never deign to give his ungrateful nephew a brand-new gaming computer with a hard-drive nerds would drool over and the kind of graphics card that only existed in Harry’s wet dreams before he bought one for himself.

   It ran like a beauty.

   Unfortunately, it was time for Harry to leave his ‘beauty’ to go fulfill a biological need. He was hungry, and had been for the past half-hour, but the game had held his attention.

   Careful not to wake any of his plump and spoiled relatives, Harry walked down the stairs of his Little Whinging home so he could sneak into the kitchen.

   The Dursleys hadn’t taken their Christmas decorations yet, most likely because they expected Harry to. He wasn’t doing it this year, not after the way Dudley boasted about his new 3DS and iPhone 5. If they were going to give Dudders top-of-the-line technology and Harry dusty old books most likely found in a resale shop, then he wasn’t fucking cleaning up after them.

   Harry’s teenage years had led him to be one rebellious little fuck in the face of his aunt and uncle. They thought him a menace and a sinner for the porn site they once found on the family computer’s history.

   Luckily, that at least scared Dudley out of sneaking into his room at night.

   Either way it was the last day of winter break, the last eve of freedom before school began. Harry figured he had to eat right.

   Instead of his usual gamer’s feast, Harry decided on a bowl of cereal before bed. The gamer’s feast consisted of soda pop, cheese doodles, chips, and cookies that all combined to give him some pretty weird dreams after eating.

   Watching the sleepy town outside his window, Harry poured the cereal into a bowl and wished for something extraordinary to happen.

   Harry wished he could wake up with powers like his character, with the respect and exultation that his worgen received in battle. He wanted someone, anyone, to break down his door and tell him he was going to have a better real life because he was special. He was magic.

   When no creatures of the night emerged to fulfill Harry’s wish, he let out a disappointed huff. The only way he’d gotten through his abusive childhood was clinging to fantasy novels and sneaking on Dudley’s computer to play simpler games with knights and kings.

   Harry marched back up to his room with the bowl in-hand.

   It was a struggle, but Harry tried to restrain himself from gaming when it was a school night. His grades were above-average in every class but chemistry, and he wanted it to stay that way. The last thing he needed was Hermione harping on him for ignoring his studies. Again.

   Maybe the reason why he was doing so badly in chemistry was a fault of his classmates. Neville was scared shitless of the teacher, Luna was always trying to talk to him about some ghost or another she swore she’d seen, and then there was Draco Malfoy.

   Teacher’s pet, spoiled brat, obnoxious, and filthy rich. His parents bought him a car for his fifteenth birthday, a brand-new corvette. Stuff like that made Harry crazy. Malfoy probably didn’t even know the value of a pound like Harry had had to learn. Malfoy probably hadn’t worked a day in his life.

   Everyone at school feared the git because his father practically bankrolled the place. They knew that if they upset Malfoy, his father would hear about it.

   Harry finished his cereal. Why the hell was he stewing over his grade school rival before bed?

   Well. There was a bit of an explanation for that, too.

   Malfoy was gorgeous. He had a crop of blonde hair that looked so tempting to grab that Harry almost did it once. His frame was thin, his arse was fit, and his eyes did that smoldering thing Harry had only seen models do.

   He’d wanked over Malfoy in bed before, even though he’d never admit it to even Ron or Hermione. After all, what stayed in Harry’s head wasn’t a crime, right?

   Giving in to his hormones, Harry put the empty bowl on his wooden dresser and moved his hand under his pajama pants and underwear, jumpstarting his stirring arousal. After all, there was nothing more satisfying than seeing your enemy the morning after you jerked off about them.

   Putting his thick-rimmed glasses down next to his empty bowl, Harry went to do just that.


	2. Back To School

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of my descriptions of school food are from traumatizing real-life experiences in public schools. The struggle is real.

**Chapter 2: Back To School**

   Draco stared down at his plate like it would somehow relieve his growing anxiety. “I can’t do this.”

   “Drama queen,” Theo accused blamelessly. “Shut up and eat your Pad Thai.” Pansy had convinced her parents to bring her and her clique a gourmet meal during lunch time so they would have a better transition back into going to school again after weeks of relaxation.

   “I cannot actually go to my second half of classes today,” Draco said, ignoring his best friend entirely. “I cannot sit in front of Mr. Flitwick while he blathers on about algebraic equations. My body is unable to handle that kind of boredom.”

   Pansy rolled her eyes. “I swear you’re worse than me. I have a New Year’s resolution.”

   “To stop blowing blokes in the boy’s locker room?” Vincent asked sardonically.

   “Nope!”

   “To stop trying to seduce the student teacher in phys-ed?” Theo suggested.

   Pansy glared him down. “For your information, Ms. Hanover is only twenty-one. That’s a four year age gap and my parents have a six year gap.”

   “She’s still your _teacher_.”

   “Who cares?” she sighed. “Anyway, my resolution is to attack the problems in my life and destroy them rather than complain about them.”

   With a snort, Draco looked up from his food. “So now you’re a sniper when it comes to unentertaining classes?” If anything, Pansy herself was an entertainment. Draco could at least roll his eyes at her from across the room in history class.

   “Obviously. Now listen up, I just heard the most delicious gossip about who got a little more than gifts in her stocking this Christmas…”

   On the other side of the cafeteria, Hermione was shifting in her lunch chair rather pathetically. The table of the richest and snobbiest students in the school had managed to get even more elite by bypassing the frankly gross school lunches. “Ron. Do you smell that?”

   “Of course I smell that. I’m the foodie in this relationship,” Ron reminded her before inhaling deeply. “Mm, there’s chicken—hint of palm sugar, definitely some chili powder—and tofu. Ew. Without the tofu it’d be perfect.”

   “Tofu is not that bad,” Hermione said with a sigh for the millionth time.

   “Hermione,” Harry told her. “I’m afraid that no matter how much you snog Ron he won’t convert to vegetarianism. The man was raised on the dead muscle of living creatures breaded and shaped like dinosaurs.” He and Ron may have been seventeen, but there was no way they were going to stop eating those chicken nuggets that Ron’s mum bought in truckloads.

   Ron nodded. “I like knowing that when I bite down into a steak that the cow probably didn’t see its death coming and was surprised by the cruelty of humanity and stuff.”

   “You two are the absolute worst.” Hermione went back to her wilted salad with a roll of her eyes. The tomatoes looked slightly plastic but at least they were never raised in a slaughterhouse.

   “What if I just stole a plate off of their table?” Ron asked them both conspiratorially. “What if I just walked over there and took one and said nothing? I think it’s sort of foolproof, you know? They wouldn’t know how to react for like ten seconds and I’d be able to get away.”

   Harry sighed and shook his head. “The hunger is going to your head, mate. Malfoy would never let you get away with it.” Harry patted his back soothingly. “He’d probably sue you as if he needs even more money than he already has.”

   His eyes stayed glued to Malfoy—was that a new shirt? Of course it was, it was after Christmas and it clung to him so well—as he stood up with a half-eaten plate of Thai food and tossed it into the trash. Ron let out a shocked whimper.

   “Don’t do it,” Harry told Ron without looking away from Draco’s waist. “Stay strong.”

   Ron sighed and went back to his slice of greasy, hard pizza with meager pepperoni slices stuck to the top.

   Draco looked up from the rubbish bin to check the clock as a countdown to his doom when he noticed Harry’s leering. He narrowed his eyes, scaring Harry’s eyes back down to the floor. What was wrong with that freak? When he wasn’t arguing against Draco’s ideas in class or giving him low blows about his family life, Potter looked like he was close to jumping his bones.

   Draco huffed and made his way past the trio of losers on a path back to his locker.

   Oh, for fuck’s sake. Some underclassman girl with bottle-blonde hair was sitting in front of it eating with her group of friends. “Move,” Draco commanded.

   “What?” the girl asked with a scowl.

   “My locker. Move.”

   “Rude,” one of her fellow posse members mumbled.

   “I don’t care,” Draco said flatly. He was in eleventh year and had seen some things in his lifetime. He’d watched fellow students break down crying over Mr. Snape failing them on a lab, he’d seen people on the football team push themselves so hard that their cleats were stained green, and he’d watched a vicious school president campaign between Daphne Greengrass and Ginny Weasley. Every experience had its equally scarring moments. Longbottom lunging at Mr. Snape and knocking over a beaker of sulfuric acid, Wood showing up to school with casts on both of his legs, Daphne splashing a glass of soda pop on Ginny’s new white dress… The first new dress she’d had in years since her parents were so dreadfully poor.

   They were all a bit like war flashbacks in Draco’s head. Too many weird things had happened to him and his grade for younger students to disrespect his seniority.

   He pushed one of their pink zebra striped bags out of the way with his foot and started putting his combo in, standing dead in the center of their lunch circle because he was entitled to it, dammit.

   “Hey,” a gruff voice from behind him spat out.

   Draco didn’t even turn around. He just kept getting textbooks and binders out, swapping them with the ones he used in the morning. Draco color-coordinated, of course. History was yellow, math was blue, health was orange, French was purple, red was science…

   “Hey,” the voice said again. “You listening to me?”

   “Not really, no.” Draco slammed his locker shut and turned around.

   Who even was this kid? He was on the underclassmen field hockey team from the looks of his jersey, but he was neither attractive enough nor talented enough for Draco to have remembered from any sports. His black hair was oily.

   “Who do you think you are?” the guy asked after exchanging a worried look with the blonde on the floor. Draco realized instantly what he was trying to do here in order to ‘defend his girlfriend’s honor’, and had about zero to no time for these heterosexual shenanigans.

   “I’m Draco Malfoy,” Draco clarified. “My father manages the school budget. My mother is head of the PTA. The real question is who you are, but I just realized that I honestly don’t care.”

   Draco started walking away, proud of his witty retort and utterly satisfied with himself. The look of awe on the jock’s face meant that he had at least heard of Draco. “Uh.”

   “Goodbye.”

   Instead of a look of lust this time around, Potter seemed to be giving him the evil eye. That sensitive little poof.

   Had a little snippiness honestly set Potter’s Morality Police alert off?

   Draco scoffed as he walked back to his lunch table, not even fully making it back there before the lunch bell rang and signaled the end of their free time.

   The school transformed into a massive current of moving students like fish swarming a lake. They were well-enough into the year to know where all their classes were, and they were smart enough to know not to show up late in a strict school like Ghat Rows, named for the proximity to the Thames and the famous steps that led down to the opening of the river.

   The designer of the school was also a bit of an imperialist—thought he was ‘complimenting’ South Asia by using one of their words sort of incorrectly—and that only encouraged students to call it ‘Gnat Rows’.

   Harry waved goodbye to Hermione and Ron who were off to their history class. He, Ron, and Hermione were all in the same level classes, but the massive attendance of a public school made class sizes huge and the actual number of classes astronomical.

   Harry himself was on his way to eleventh year health.

   His favorite part about walking alone in the hallway was overhearing the conversations around him. Well, his first favorite part was not hearing Ron and Hermione’s flirtations for a second longer than necessary, but snooping was still fun.

   Lavender Brown and Cho Chang were amid debate over whether or not the Doctor Who finale was any good right beside Harry and seemed to have no idea he was listening in.

   “I miss Donna,” Cho sighed. “I miss when companions were just regular people instead of crazy ideas that no real woman can actually live up to.”

   Lavender curled one of her own locks around her finger trying to decide whether or not she agreed with that. “But it was cool. You have to admit the whole thing with Clara being everywhere was cool.”

   “It was cool, but it was all about The Doctor! He’s not supposed to be the important one in the series, the humans are. The normal humans.”

   “But The Doctor’s grave? The thing with River Song? You don’t think that can redeem the mistakes Moffat has made?”

   Cho frowned. “I do love my Doctor and River dynamic.”

   “Exactly. Want to re-watch Silence in the Library at my house tonight?” Lavender asked and bit down on her lower lip. To Harry, the question seemed to have… A romantic weight to it?

   “Totally,” Cho breathed, clutching her books tight to her chest. “Totally.”

   As the two women split off from the crowd, Harry walked into his health class alone. The only real friend he had in the class was Luna Lovegood since everyone else in the class was either part of Draco’s clique or practically never spoke.

   “Welcome back,” the teacher cooed in a voice that Harry would definitely describe as patronizing. “I hope you all had a nice holiday break, but it’s time to get back to learning.” There wasn’t a single person in the room happy to hear that.

   “We’ll be picking up where we left off on sexually transmitted diseases, so get your information charts out so you can fill in the physical symptoms and methods they can be transferred.”

   “Wonderful,” Harry muttered to Luna, who gave him a little laugh in response. She was too busy drawing fields of elaborately-designed flowers to take notes on STDs, and her chart reflected that with about two real facts on it and a plethora of daisies.

   Luna drew the swirl of a green stem with her thin-tip pen. “We should be learning about important things like the secret existence of wizards and witches among us,” Luna lamented. “If everyone started using protection during sex so this class would become unnecessary, maybe we would reveal the world that’s right in front of our eyes.”

   Harry nodded even though he didn’t believe a word of it. Luna was a sweet girl, and he often wished that what she said was true, but there was no way in hell magic was real. Harry wished it was with almost every atom in his existence, but it wasn’t. “I’d go to that class,” Harry told her anyway.

   Blaise Zabini as Draco’s right-hand man took the liberty to laugh at the conversation he was overhearing.

   “Shut up,” Harry snapped. Luna had never done a single malicious thing to anyone; she just thought a little differently was all.

   “Virgins,” Blaise complained to Draco, letting them both share a moment of laughter.

   “Actually,” Luna piped up. Harry cringed in advance without even knowing what she would say, but the room had gone dead silent and intent to listening to this Lovegood Announcement. “I’m not. I just wanted to make sure you had your facts all sorted out. The truth is the most important thing in the world.” Spoken like a true journalist.

   Harry didn’t know what to feel worse about: the fact that Luna Lovegood got laid before him, the fact that Blaise actually looked at her with some kind of respect in that moment, or the fact that Draco never once took his eyes off of Harry. It was like the bastard could smell the inexperience on him and Harry couldn’t even try to lie his way out of it.

   “Thank you for sharing, Ms. Lovegood,” the woman at the front of the classroom nodded. “Perhaps you can tell us how genital herpes is spread?” The health teacher was worried about these kids, honestly. If even intellectual Luna was bumping uglies with her classmates then there was no hope for abstinence at Ghat.

   Harry finally picked something to feel worse about: the way Luna chipperly informed the class, “Anal, oral, and vaginal sex.”

   This was going to be a long, long hour.

xxxxx

**[Battleground] [Jeeremy-Hyjal]: Horde left mage tower exposed**

**[Battleground][Ripper-Darkspear]: that’s bcuz they have the flag dipshit**

   Harry was weighing his options of recapturing the tower or going after whichever unlucky bastard had captured the flag—yes, that was what the battlefield and fight for dominance among warring factions boiled down to in a PC game, capturing a flag—when the decision was made for him.

   A blood elf atop a deep purple bird rushed past Harry and in an instant the chase was on.

   The flag rippled in the virtual wind as Harry chased him down. Spells were being hurled left and right, but they all soared past the two mounted heroes.

   Finally, Harry was in range.

   His fingers flew across the keyboard to trigger a chain of holy spells raining down to smite the mage in his bright and elegant robes.

   When the blood elf fell from his bird to face-plant hard against the violet rocks the battle was being held on, Harry recognized him from just a day ago.

**[Battleground][Worgasm-Proudmoore]: Now who sucks to suck?**

**[Battleground][Dragonis-Proudmoore]: Probably still you.**

   The elf fired the chilly ice shards that had killed the worgen the first time around, but Draco had lost his advantage.

   The battle was longer this time around. Harry’s swords clashed against Draco’s armor, the screen exploding in a flurry of spells, flashing lights, bolts of water—

   “Harry!” Dudley yelled from downstairs. “Harry!”

   Harry couldn’t even be properly happy that he’d killed his opponent. The blood elf fell to the ground and one of Harry’s fellow soldiers picked up the flag he had dropped in order to gain points for the Alliance.

   “ _Harry_!”

   “In the middle of something!”

   “Harry, have you seen my headphones?”

   He made a face and tried to focus his energy back on the battlefield. That mage would be resurrected soon enough and Harry wasn’t in the mood to be stalked for the next ten minutes until one of their sides won.

   “ _Harry_!”

   “No, Dudley, I haven’t seen your headphones!” he shouted at his closed door. It was closed for a reason, but Dudley never seemed to get that.

   Dudley wasn’t as mean as he used to be so Harry figured he should be slightly grateful, but the thickness of his head was at a consistent plateau. Not even seventeen years growing up beside Harry could change that.

**[Battleground][Invoke-Arthas]: Incoming at Fel Reaver Ruins**

**[Battleground][Joff-Thaurissan]: i’m so horny right now**

**[Battleground][Invoke-Arthas]: I will give you a handjob if you COME DEFEND THE FEL REAVER RUINS**

**[Battleground][Joff-Thaurissan]: on my way.**

   Aw, the romance between those two was palpable.

**[Battleground][Ripper-Darkspear]: fags**

   It was then that something sort of wonderful happened.

**[Battleground][Dragonis-Proudmoore]: Jealous?**

**[Battleground][Worgasm-Proudmoore]: Jealous?**

   According to the time stamps on the moments those two identical questions, Draco had hit enter precisely one second before Harry had.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Well, you may be a camping bastard but you at least have a sense of humor.**

   Draco was surprised that the lycanthrope had actually contacted him in private.

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: And you’re a squishy pally but at least you have a sense of humor.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Squishy? Did you miss the part where I killed you?**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: I killed you first.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Because you snuck up on me.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: The only reason you could bring me down was because my health was already low from the battlefield. There’s no way you would be able to do it in a fair duel.**

   Before Harry could bicker even more with a stranger on the internet, the battleground was over and the page of end results showed the statistics that led to that victory. It seemed the Alliance had won without much help from Harry except that one kill on the flag-carrier. Well.

   It was comforting to know that his faction had it together, but Harry didn’t feel the same post-victory glory since he was so distracted during the fight by Dudley and this stupid, stupid elf. Maybe there was a way to shut him up for good.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Then you’re on.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: When and where, wolf boy?**

   “Harry! Help Dudley find his headphones!” Uncle Vernon roared from the bottom of the stairs. “Did you take them? I swear, Potter, if you took those damned headphones you’ll be paying for them in double! With interest!”

   “One minute,” Harry resigned.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Add me to your social list, okay? I’ve got to go.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: Wow, didn’t know I’d scare you so easily.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: I’m not scared of you. I am just surrounded by criminally insane family members.**

   Draco laughed. To his mother standing in the hall of Draco’s room it was sort of a sad laugh, the kind where nobody else was laughing in return. Just her Draco and a screen.

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: Understood. Later tonight?**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Later tonight.**

xxxxx

   There were definitely upsides to living with your best friend. You got to see each other at weird hours of the night, you got to make food together, and you basically became brothers. Unfortunately, the downsides were seeing each other at weird hours, making food together, and becoming brothers as well.

   Draco set his laptop down on the edge of Theo’s bed and did as most annoying brothers were apt to do. “Move over.”

   “I’m watching Hell’s Kitchen,” Theo informed him as if that granted him the right to be left alone in Draco’s home.

   “I could care less if you were wanking.”

   Their friendship was sort of destined because of how close their fathers had been in school, but many things had changed since then.

   Lucius Malfoy and Marcus Nott had grown up in a different world from the world their sons were in. They ruled with money—and with tyranny. From embezzling to ‘taking care’ of business competition, they used to think themselves above the law. Lucius eventually got over that and rose to a job in the government where he would only break minor laws, but Theo’s father never did.

   He was currently serving the ninth of his fifteen years locked up for a massive Ponzi scheme that had cheated innocent elderly and soft-minded Englishpeople out of their retirement funds, their savings, and basically every dollar they had to their names.

   The bright side, Draco supposed, was that at age eight he’d finally got another kid in the house to play with. The old money of London took care of their own, and Narcissa hadn’t hesitated to move Theo right in.

   From the outside it must have seemed ten different kinds of inappropriate. Draco was gay, Theo was gay, and the general public was judgmental.

   When Draco and Theo consecutively came out in ninth year, Lucius was somewhere beyond suspicious and disturbed. It took Draco and Theo at least a year to convince him that yes they were just friends and no they had never snogged, shagged, or hosted wild orgies in the family Mansion full of heirlooms and golden chandeliers they occupied.

   They both didn’t count that time at Pansy’s thirteenth birthday party where she’d made them play spin-the-bottle, so no. _Technically_ they did not snog. Even if they had, it was purely chaste.

   Theo had a boyfriend anyway, and had since tenth year.

   “Your teenybopper too busy to watch angry cooking shows with you tonight?” Draco teased. It was at first glance the most unlikely couple in the entire school, save if Draco and Harry ever hooked up for some demented reason.

   “ _Colin_ ,” Theo stressed. Draco knew what Colin Creevey’s name was since he’d been in the grade below them ever since they were in kindergarten, but that didn’t stop him from torturing Theo over it.

   Draco logged into his World of Warcraft account on Theo’s bed so he could show someone how epically powerful he would be in the upcoming fight with Worgasm.

   “Say it with me, Draco. Two syllables: Call- _in_.”

   “Fine,” Draco sighed. He would only give in to Theo’s gushy teen romance if only for some attention.

   The opposites-attract dynamic Theo and Colin had honestly made Draco feel sick to his stomach. Colin was honey-sweet and his smile lit up a room. In essence, he was everything that Theo was not. Innocent, optimistic, and bright to Theodore’s jaded, pessimistic, and general brooding.

   Apparently that sort of bullshit made Theo happy or something. Draco put up with his notebook doodles of Colin’s name and covering for Theo when he snuck Colin into their massive house—thank fuck the walls were thick—for that alone. Well, that and attention.

   “Fine. Call- _in_ ,” he huffed.

   “Photography club meets today.”

   “Of course.” The way Draco said it was almost a personification of his snobby characteristics. Draco opened his mouth to say those two words and released a monster of pretention and sarcasm into the room.

   “So you’ve clearly come in here to show off your nerd skills,” Theo said as he finally got on the topic Draco was in his room and personal space for. He’d spent enough years studying Draco’s little ticks and idiosyncrasies to understand that Draco could never officially ask for adoration and went in a pretty roundabout way to get it instead. “Which panda-thing are you killing today?”

   “Wolf-thing,” Draco corrected.

   “Of course,” Theo echoed in his mock-Draco voice.

   Draco gave him a shove before checking to see if the other man was online. His stomach was full of macaroni and cheese, and he’d been sure to give the worgen ample time to deal with whatever real-life problem was going down before logging back in.

   “Is the wolf-thing at least hot?”

   “Sort of,” Draco answered honestly before laughing. “I dunno. Could be some fat old woman in a vat of tomato sauce for all I know, but I like to imagine everyone who plays this game is gorgeous. That this is some tall, dark, beautiful man playing shirtless in his off-time from his modeling job. He also has a box of kittens next to him because he routinely fosters animals.” Nothing bigger than a Chihuahua, though. Draco hated big animals.

   Theo shook his head. “It really is a wonder you’re single. You have _such_ low standards. It’s highly realistic and even a little self-deprecating,” he snarked.

   “Build up my self-confidence,” Draco joked right back. “It’s pretty low.”

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Meet in the Valley of Four Winds?**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: I’ll be waiting.**

   “Look! Theo, stop looking at the television screen. Turn that off; I’m much more important than Gordon Ramsey. Look! Here he is, I’m going to kill him!”

   “Mhm…” Theo murmured comfortingly while he didn’t even turn the television program down. “Wow. Impressive.”

   “Yes! I’m so going to win!”

   “That’s nice, Draco.”

   “Fuck, fuck, this bitch knows how to use stuns.”

   “Mhmm.”

   “Are you watching?”

   Theo slipped right back into his Draco-voice. “Of course.”

   Draco had a pretty surprising ability to punch Theo in the arm before going right back to his high-stakes battle. He was sure he’d come out on top.


	3. Chips and Salsa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for the fabulous Alijandra's Editor who suggested a detention scene! Ah, I love when these two homos are stuck together in a small classroom. It’s also so strange writing them as immature teenagers! I’ll be bringing in some characters I haven’t used in HP fics in the past, so let’s see how this goes!  
> Also I’m adding social chat on mobile devices that isn’t limited to guild members because yolo.

**Chapter 3: Chips and Salsa**

   Mr. Snape was in general a despicable and infamous human being, but he knew some teaching tricks. The oldest trick in the book being that during projects the people doing best in the class and the people doing poorly should be put together in order to average their work.

   Potter himself wasn’t failing even though lots of his little friends were, but he looked the most miserable out of the bunch and Snape honestly just wanted to make him even more miserable. It was more of a life goal for him, an ambition that never ended.

   You know, just like all of those other adults who have incessant blood feuds against teenagers.

   “…Malfoy and Potter,” Snape assigned, ignoring the squeak of annoyance from Draco. “Bones and Weasley, and that leaves Granger with Goyle.” He took a special sort of pleasure in torturing Hermione, too. If only she hadn’t befriended Potter maybe she’d be safe from Snape’s sadistic tendencies, but the girl who acted suspiciously like Lily Potter had forged a friendship with the boy who looked like James Potter. It spelled their doom.

   If Snape squinted his already beady eyes then he could see a young James sitting right there in front of him. The fashions had changed and Harry was thinner but he had James’ stupid jawline and his defective eyesight, which made their faces near identical under the glasses.

   Well, except the eyes.

   Snape was jarred from whatever the hateful version of nostalgia was when the bell rang. “You will be using the esters we’ve been studying to create scents of banana with Ethyl butyrate, strawberry with Methyl cinnamate, and apple with Ethyl isovalerate. Don’t forget that it’s due on Monday,” he said ominously. “And is worth a large portion of your semester grade. I won’t tolerate sloppiness, lateness, or inaccuracy. You’d do best to start immediately, and cancel your weekend plans ahead of time on the actual formulas and the oral written presentations on the forming of esters.”

   For one harmonious moment, the class was united in their rage. It was sort of beautiful how disliking a teacher could transcend social boundaries in school. Nerds could look to stoners and exchange the same tired, angry look without fear of an argument or retribution and camaraderie would grow from that bitter bridge they’d built right over Snape’s grade book.

   “Excuse me,” Draco said as his classmates filtered out into the hall. He wasn’t going down the partner rabbit hole without a fight. “I can’t work with Potter. Change my partner.”

   The greasy-haired teacher may have had students he didn’t despise, but that didn’t make them immune to his wrath. “Draco, you’ll work with Potter and I won’t hear anything more about it.”

   “But—!”

   “But nothing. I’m your teacher and this is your assignment.”

   “You’re my godfather,” Draco added with growing frustration. To say he woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning would be a grand understatement.

   Draco was still reeling from his player-versus-player loss against that arrogant twit of a worgen. He refused to accept that as defeat and had gone up against Worgasm for the best two out of three and only won once. Just when he suggested they do the best three out of five, the other man said he had to ‘go to sleep’ and ‘rest’ or some utter madness like that. Only when Draco looked at Theo’s alarm clock glowing in the dark over his snoring body did he realize it was three in the morning.

   “Take pity on me.” Draco tried a new angle. “It’s no secret that you loathe Potter, so why force him on me?”

   “Mr. Snape? Loathe _me_?” Harry asked from the back of the room.

   What? How long had he been there? Draco’s face flooded with an involuntary red, so he hid it from both Severus and Harry by pretending he got an important text message. His iPhone was always there for him.

   It wasn’t like Draco had a problem with Harry overhearing Draco’s passionate dislike of him, but he just hadn’t expected Harry to be listening in behind him like some fly on the wall. It was very Boo Radley of him.

   “There’s _no way_ he loathes me,” Harry continued to snark as he sauntered up to the embarrassed blonde. “If he hated me, he’d treat me like trash and purposefully give me lower grades. Oh, wait.”

   “You earn every grade you receive, Potter,” Snape growled. If Harry took this idea of ‘injustice’ to Principal Dumbledore then Snape could be in a world of trouble so he did his best to get Potter to stay quiet about it.

   Harry gave him a stiff smile. “Sure.”

   There were rarely moments where Severus Snape felt comfortable, but the level of discomfort he was in was pretty astounding in that moment. He collected his bag and the papers he would be failing everyone on later that night in a rush. “You two are working together and that’s final. I would suggest meeting in the library to finish up, since… Well. Draco’s house has valuables that aren’t nailed down and Potter’s house is a closet.”

   That would be insulting if Harry cared about how people perceived the Dursleys. As far as he was concerned, Harry wasn’t a part of that ‘family’ unit. “Mr. Snape,” he said with that same fake grin. “I’ve been out of the closet for quite a long time now.”

   Draco snorted out a laugh in spite of himself.

   “Thank you for that pleasant reminder. That was exactly what I needed to think of before eating lunch,” Snape snarled before fleeing for good. His jacket swept like a cape behind him, and it sort of reminded Harry of the way that mages wore their robes.

   “D’you think he’ll be able to make it to the toilets before he throws up?” Harry asked Draco in a moment of calm before the storm.

   “Nope. He’s probably lost his breakfast all over the hallway floor and now Filch will have to clean it up,” Draco decided. “You’re a horrible person, Potter, giving more work to that Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

   Oh, Harry really had to try his best not to laugh at that. Draco was so _mean_ , but sometimes he really hit the nail on the head.

   “And now you’re trying not to laugh? Please, you may have everyone else in this dump fooled into thinking you’re a nice guy, but not me. Don’t even try.”

   “What?” Harry scoffed. “You’re the one who thinks he’s so great when you’re actually a complete jerk.”

   “Tell it to someone who cares, Potter.”

   “It’s pretty fucked up that you wouldn’t care about how you try and belittle people. My friends, too.”

   Draco crossed his arms defensively. “I don’t try and belittle anyone,” he snapped. “I just tell the truth. For example: you’re being a twat right now as expected. That’s the truth and that’s why I don’t want to work with you.”

   “Have you ever thought that nobody wants to hear your version of the truth?” Harry sighed at the self-importance of it all.

   “ _What_?”

   “Exactly. Your opinion isn’t always called for; especially when you’re such a brat.”

   “Shut up. You don’t know anything about me,” Draco growled. “Your Weasel and Granger aren’t wide-eyed innocents in this and neither are you. You think that your freaky threesome is above your own moral standards.”

   “I do not!” Harry wasn’t even addressing the ‘threesome’ remark.

   “Hitting people is wrong, except for when Granger hit me in primary school. Insulting people is wrong, except for when Weasley gets jealous and makes jokes about my family. Do I need to remind you of half of the things he said to me before you came out?” Draco was going straight for the jugular with that one.

   Ron had been raised by a pack of unruly older brothers, and he’d heard his fair share of ‘fag’, ‘gay’, and ‘queer’ thrown around as an insult. Molly would always correct them with a huff, but Ron still heard it. Only after Harry came out and Charlie came out did he realize how screwed up and unfair it had all been.

   Harry shifted his weight from one foot to the other in a nervous habit. “We all did idiotic things when we were younger. Ron knows what he did was wrong, he knows he shouldn’t have called you those names—But you? You sit on your high horse and play the victim when you’re the one who started this all.”

   “How did _I_ start this? You turned your nose up at me when we were children!”

   “Because I could tell!” Harry retorted, voice climbing in volume. “I could tell that you were looking down on everyone around me. You had a shit attitude!”

   “You have a shit double-standard for yourself! You whine and preach about not judging people but you do it too!”

   “I judge you on your actions!”

   “And I judge you on your actions!”

   A small crowd had formed around the Chemistry door to witness what they hoped would be the next school throw-down. That would make two guy-on-guy fights in one week after Zacharias Smith had decked a ninth year who called him a coward.

   “You,” Harry charged. “Are a self-centered, spoiled, unpleasant… Bully! You’re a bully!”

   “You,” Draco countered. “Are a hypocritical, stubborn, uncouth bonehead with no real idea what he’s talking about!”

   “Ahem.”

   Draco and Harry didn’t need to turn around to know which teacher had caught them in the middle of a screaming match.

   They froze in place and hoped to be so still that Umbridge would leave them alone because she thought they were dead. That worked on black bears and she was about the size of one…

   “I thought we had this conversation last month,” Umbridge said as she teetered forward on her pink high heels. “This institution of learning has a strict policy on harassment and inappropriate language.”

   “I’m not _harassing_ him,” Harry said as if the thought was unbearable. That was just school talk for ‘causing trouble’ and it looked much more official on a report, but Harry resented it all the same. “Mr. Snape put us together on a project. I’m not seeking this prat out just to mess with him.”

   Draco rolled his eyes. “You wish you could mess with me.”

   “What! What, I—No! No I don’t!” Harry babbled.

   “Boys,” Ms. Umbridge said sweetly, her hands coming together and fingers intertwining like little sausages. “I’m sure you can work all of this out in detention hall after school.”

   No! Draco had to go home and beat the crap out of Worgasm! That sounded like a ridiculous sentence to anyone outside of the situation, but Draco really did value his standing in World of Warcraft no matter what the plebeians around him thought. He worked his best to perfect his magic and still someone had beaten him. He had to consult online guides, check up with his mage friends…

   “And maybe you can finish your project then, too,” Mrs. Umbridge cooed. As much as she liked Draco, she had to at least pretend that she didn’t have favorites so that Principal Dumbledore would get off of her back. “After all, skipping detention after school will result in a Saturday detention and a call home to your parents. Guardians,” she corrected for Harry’s sake as if he needed one more reminder his parents were dead. “Do I make myself clear?”

   Draco and Harry looked at the tips of their shoes, still furious at one another. They also still knew what another outburst in front of a teacher would do to them.

   “Ahem.” Umbridge cleared her throat and adjusted the Siamese kitten pin on her rose blazer lapel. “I said: Do I make myself clear?”

   “Yes,” they grumbled. Draco hated that submission to authority.

   The crowd had at least been scared off by the pink monstrosity that was the school’s civics teacher so the social damage was minimal, but the damage to Draco and Harry’s already tenuous rivalry was visible.

   “Prick,” Harry muttered under his breath.

   “At least I get prick.”

   Thankfully, Umbridge didn’t hear that one before she spun on her heels and went off to patrol the hallways during lunch. Public displays of affection were strictly forbidden in the hallways, and nothing delighted Dolores more than separating happy young couples. She never had love at that age, so why should they?

   “See you in detention,” Harry scowled. This was entirely Draco’s fault as far as he was concerned and he was not going to let the other man forget it.

xxxxx

   Harry was imagining at least seven different ways to poison Snape with the chemicals before him and Draco in the lab room.

   Even the distilled water could drown the old man; that would at least be satisfying to watch.

   From behind the lab table that Draco and Harry shared and where Harry was plotting homicide were two regulars in Mrs. McGonagall’s detention hall. The English teacher knew them and their shenanigans far too well.

   “It’s not my fault the bottle rocket crashed into the school,” Seamus grumbled to his boyfriend. “If I was just a foot farther…”

   Dean patted Seamus on the back with his free hand. Dean’s left hand was busy scrawling out a new graffiti design he planned to put on the bridge on 23rd. There was always a seat for London’s most precocious ‘street artist’ in detention.

   The rainbow that mysteriously appeared on St. Helen’s bell tower? Well, they shouldn’t have given Dean that dirty look when he kissed Seamus in front of them. The mouse chasing the cat on that alley off Oxford Street? A political statement.

   While privately Minerva McGonagall agreed with most of those statements wholeheartedly, the mural of children being forced into a meat grinder labeled ‘the system’ on his desk in journalism was yet another graffiti infraction.

   Dean didn’t really mind either way. “I’m sure you’ll get it next time,” he assured Seamus.

   “Aw, you’re so sweet to me.” That Irish accent was charming to two people in the entire world: Seamus’ mother and Dean Thomas. That was it.

   “What can I say? I like a guy who can make some sparks.”

   Draco let out an exaggerated and disgusted sigh. Happy couples made him absolutely insane. He already had to deal with Theo and Colin, so his quota for the year on people who were annoyingly in love was met.

   Lifting his goggles up, Draco looked down at the finished esters. “Alright, now you just write the papers. Write them well, Potter. Some of us have dreams beyond this sad institution.”

   “Sitting on your arse some more?” Harry snipped. He was already halfway through the papers when Draco gave him that imperious command. They’d divided the work evenly in a surprisingly democratic method that gave Draco the actual chemistry and Harry some busywork he couldn’t really screw up on.

   “For your information, no. I have my entire career path planned,” Draco boasted.

   Wow, Harry so did not care at all.

   He went back to writing the explanation—admittedly using his phone to Google about half of the answers. Draco took to putting his lab gear away, leaving Harry to smile to himself about the angry red lines the goggles left on his face.

   “Wanna split a milkshake after this?” Seamus asked Dean with little hearts in his eyes. Well, metaphorical hearts, but still. “Or are you in for extended detention this time, too?”

   Dean ran a hand through his hair like some greaser in a fifties movie. “I dunno, babe. I’ve been in pretty bad trouble with the law, they may lock me up for a long time,” he joked with a big, cheesy grin.

   “Gee whiz,” Seamus said in mock-amazement. He caught right on to this big joke. “You sure are one bad boy.”

   “And what’re you gonna do about it?”

   “Oh, I’ll tell you what I’ll do about it,” was all Harry could hear before Seamus leaned in and whispered the rest in Dean’s ear.

   It all reminded Harry of Ron and Hermione. The quiet laughs, the lip-biting, the leaving Harry alone to go somewhere private… It was horrifyingly couple-y. “If I ever get like that, shoot me,” he grumbled to himself.

   “My pleasure,” Draco sneered.

   “That wasn’t to you.”

   “So you’re just talking to yourself? I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything different,” Draco laughed before returning to the cluster of desks in the middle of the room, presumably to finish out the two hours of punishment with his back turned to Harry.

   Harry let out a slow hiss of air. McGonagall would never tolerate a fight in her study hall but that didn’t stop Harry from wanting to start one.

   If this were World of Warcraft, Draco would have to suffer under Harry’s blades. It was a violent thought, but there was also no such thing as death in WoW. Draco would respawn moments later in a huff and a large armor repair bill and nobody would be permanently hurt.

   Maybe then Draco would respect him.

   From his front pocket, Harry’s phone buzzed and interrupted his thoughts. He reached down to check what the notification was.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Going to have to postpone tonight’s 3/5 to after dinner.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Who said I would even agree to a 3/5? I won 2/3.**

   Harry put his pen down for a moment, sure that Draco wouldn’t check up on his progress since the esters were done. If anything, Harry was glad they wouldn’t have to meet up over the weekend. A Friday afternoon was all Harry could take of him.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: And now you’re going to lose the 3/5.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: No way.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Yes way.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Has anyone ever told you that you’re terribly persistent?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I prefer the term ‘dedicated’.**

Harry chuckled to himself, and for a moment he couldn’t even hear the sweet-talk between Dean and Seamus behind him.

   A question gnawed at him, though.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: What’s your name?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: What’s it matter to you?**

   Harry frowned.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’m just wondering. I mean, if you’re going to bug me I may as well know your name.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I’m not ‘bugging’ you; I’m beating you in combat.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You also just used a semicolon on the internet. See why I need to know your name? I have to find out what dying breed you’re a part of.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Breed? What am I, an actual dragon?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Blood elves are technically humanoids, so no.**

Harry heard Draco snicker about something, momentarily taking him out of whatever dynamic he and a stranger had in a mobile chatroom.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: You know, it’s also rare finding someone on here that doesn’t use the ‘xD’ face every other word. What breed are you?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Just a werewolf in London. And you mean to tell me that the twelve year-olds playing in their basements on here aren’t mentally stimulating you? Wow, that is completely unbelievable. Are their prods of ‘yo fag’ and emoticons not enough to inspire friendship?**

   Oh, this man had found Draco’s weakness. Scathing, awful sarcasm.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Apparently not. Do you live in London?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You still haven’t told me your name. But… Yes.**

   All those presentations on web safety in primary school had really been lost on Harry.

   In all honesty, it was dangerous how he’d grown to trust these people on the internet. They hadn’t harmed him for seventeen years! While that was partially because he never gave out his address, he’d met his fair share of gaming buddies in person.

   Harry was so recklessly desperate to escape the situation he was in with an unloving home that he would overshare as much as he could. It was a sick hope, but really… Really he hoped one day some bloke with real supernatural powers would figure out where he was and come to whisk him away into a world of shadows and secrets.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’m taking it you live here too?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Yes, yes. This server is based in California, but I can’t resist the pull of an ample supply of men who like men who like video games.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I used to play on British servers. This is infinitely better, trust me.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Trust you? For all I know you’re a pedophile jerking off to this chat in his dead mum’s nightgown Norman Bates-style.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: And for all I know you’re a sentient tortilla chip who found its way to a keyboard. I don’t have any of my mum’s old nightgowns if that’s any comfort.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: What**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Oh my god**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Shit shit shit fuck**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Shit I’m an arse**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You definitely are.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Fuuuuuuck**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Hey, don’t worry about it. You didn’t know. The ‘yo mama’ jokes on here get old, though.**

   Draco wouldn’t be anywhere near that accepting if it was his mum who was… You know. Draco couldn’t even think about it! His mum brought him breakfast in bed on weekends and painted pictures of sunsets and ducks. Draco didn’t ever want to think of a life without her even though it was inevitable. She would die before him, but Draco didn’t ever want to believe it.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Fuck.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Just for future reference my father is also dead.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Fuck fuck fuck fuck**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’m officially convinced you’re actually a sentient tortilla chip.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: How are you even on a phone right now? How do you even have a computer?**

   Harry laughed. What kind of question was that?

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Cellphones don’t actually grow as separate limbs from parents, so I got mine from a store. You know, where you go to purchase items in exchange for government-issued monetary value.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I know that.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I live with my aunt and uncle. I have a job and I bought my own computer and phone.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Where do you work?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: A mystical land full of bizarre and grotesque creatures.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: …?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Cashier at a pharmacy.**

   Oh, Draco really wished he hadn’t acted like such an arse earlier. This bloke was actually funny, and he’d gone and fucked it up when he forgot that not everyone was as fortunate as him.

   He forgot things like that a lot. He’d roll his eyes when someone said they weren’t going to college because of money reasons without thinking that there really was no funding for them. Draco laughed at people whose credit cards got declined in stores he was shopping at. He was, essentially, a rich bitch.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Oh. That sounds interesting.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Woah, calm down there! Your passionate response almost blew me away! You really need to learn how to reign in your emotions, mate.**

   Considering that every other message Draco had entered had failed miserably, he tried a sincere one.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: You’re funny.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Thanks?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: You’re welcome.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: So I’m guessing you’re not giving up on the 3/5.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Nope. You’re just going to have to live with it. Once I get my new staff enchanted you are a dead wolf walking.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You’re on.**

   Satisfied, Draco clicked his phone off. Even if he had a terrible day in detention with Potter, he had a hot WoW date that night with a man who believed him to be a sentient tortilla chip.

   Weirdly enough, Draco was excited. He counted down the minutes on the clock, and actually wound up shoving Potter out of his way to get to the door faster.


	4. Carry On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello yes this is not a drill this is the Emergency Rebecca Alarm sounding and I repeat: this is not a drill. I desperately need someone to RP Levi/Eren from Attack on Titan with me so I can die a slow, wonderful death and wind up in gay heaven. If you haven’t watched Attack on Titan (I can’t blame you, I actually swore off anime about four years ago and the plotline in this one is actually good enough for me to break my vow) then you need to. Immediately. That is all.  
> Also holy crap school is awful and all-consuming but vaguely rewarding since I’m a senior.

**Chapter 4: Carry On**

   Not that Harry was keeping track of anniversaries or anything, but it had officially been three weeks since he met Dragonis (whoever he was) online. He wondered if he should send him some in-game cookies or cupcakes before once again remembering that he had _no idea who this person was_.

   It was creepy, it was a red flag, and it really should have bothered Harry more than it actually did.

   He was surprisingly nonchalant about the whole ‘flirtationship with a stranger on the internet’ thing. Harry had his fair share of online friends, some of them from when he was just a kid messing around on Runescape. Maybe it had desensitized him to the dangers of it all and maybe it would be his downfall someday, but it hadn’t affected him yet.

   The ‘yet’ bit was unsettling nonetheless. There was still very much an opportunity for him to be duped by an internet predator with a handful of candy.

   Some sick part of Harry wondered what the Dursleys would think. That night at dinner they had gushed over Dudley’s achievements on the wrestling team as usual and ignored Harry. How would they know who Harry was talking to online?

   Harry could see the Nightline special so clearly in his mind if things ever did go south.

   ‘The Search for Harry Potter’. A stern anchorwoman would describe the neglect of the Dursleys with a pointed tone. They’d bring them in for interviews and Petunia would cry—whether or not it was real was questionable.

   Then the television would show a blurry screen image of a chat log as some funky mystery music played. ‘That day, Harry Potter met a man on the internet who was not at all what he seemed…’

   Then they’d show Harry’s last school photo and beg anyone with information about this missing, troubled gay teen to call some hotline or another. When they gave up the search with no leads but a man who called himself ‘Dragonis’ on the Blizzard game World of Warcraft, they would make a new internet safety law or program or something in his honor. Harry’s Law or Harry’s Legacy or something.

**[Dragonis]: Homework finally done. What’re you up to?**

   Even though Harry had literally just been thinking about the man abducting him, his heart leapt at the little noise his message made.

**[Worgasm]: Daily quests as usual. I swear that when I die I’ll be doing these dailies in hell, an unending cycle of reputation grinding…**

**[Dragonis]: And only for twenty quid a month.**

**[Worgasm]:  I hate this game.**

**[Dragonis]: You love this game.**

**[Worgasm]: I’m married to it. I can’t ever divorce it because now that we have a joint bank account and a mortgage and kids together.**

**[Dragonis]: But deep down, you still love it.**

   Harry smiled before typing again.

**[Worgasm]: Yeah, I love it.**

   There was a lull in the chat while Harry rode his panther around the Thundering Isle, a new addition to the game full of secrets to discover and riches to be had. Harry still had to collect the separate parts of a crumbling statue so he could put them together and complete his quest.

**[Worgasm]: How are you doing?**

**[Dragonis]: Look at you being all social. You know, it’s hard to believe you were so rude to me three weeks ago.**

   Three weeks… Had he been counting the days too?

**[Dragonis]: I’m fine though, so thank you. The school-week was slightly nightmarish as usual but I have the whole weekend to myself to stew in my own rage over the incompetence of my fellow classmates and of my teachers.**

**[Worgasm]: Sounds relaxing.**

**[Dragonis]: It is.**

**[Dragonis]: It’s actually even a little bit comforting. I have this chemistry teacher and he’s a total berk, but somehow he still has a job. He hates children and he still has a job working with children. Nothing is impossible. The world is our oyster no matter how big of fuck-ups we are.**

**[Worgasm]: You know, you find some strange things beautiful.**

**[Dragonis]: Like you, yes.**

   Harry rolled his eyes.

**[Worgasm]: You don’t even know what I look like.**

**[Dragonis]: I’m just assuming that you’re a wolf-like beast like your character. I’m totally into that.**

**[Worgasm]: Ah, yes, the ever-so common kink of bestiality.**

**[Dragonis]: It’s probably the one kink I actually don’t have.**

   Was that an overshare? Oh well.

**[Worgasm]: Well, I for one am a Conservative and Family-Oriented Young Man. How dare you corrupt me like this. My virgin eyes are blacking out. Where’s the keyboard? What keys am I even pressing?**

**[Dragonis]: Haha**

**[Dragonis]: Brb. Parent aggro.**

   “One second, Father!”

   “Don’t you ‘one second’ me,” Lucius called from the bottom of the stairs.

   Draco huffed and set his laptop to the side. “Fine.” With his penguin pajamas and matching slippers on, Draco marched his sorry arse downstairs to whatever sort of discipline awaited him.

   Lucius was waiting for him and was still dressed in his work-clothes.

   “How was work?” Draco asked obligingly. Lucius’ position on the school-board put food on the table, quid in their pockets, and World of Warcraft on Draco’s laptop. He had to be the appreciative of that in a sort of traditional ‘great son’ sort of way.

   “Fine,” Lucius answered cordially even though it had been a trying day with the new lesson plans for the primary school children trying to integrate some form of education on homosexual couples and parents into the regular program. It had been a goal of Lucius’ as part of his mission to understand every part of his son. “And school?”

   “Fine.”

   “Then what is this I hear from Severus about recent infractions?”

   “They were nothing,” Draco explained away quickly. From the living room he could hear Theo audibly snort at that, which really wasn’t helping Draco’s case. Such an unreliable brother-thing.

   Lucius barely believed that even without Theo’s scoff. “Who’s bothering you in school? Are they harassing you? I’ll sue.”

   “It’s not a homophobe,” Draco sighed. The last bloke who called Draco a ‘fag’ as an insult had been promptly dealt with and was currently walking with a limp of mysterious origins. “Just someone below me in the social ladder who had a jealous hissy fit.”

   “Ah, of course.”

   Theo looked up from his place on the couch, homework still in his lap. “Poor Draco, always plagued with fans and naysayers,” he joked. The joke, of course, flew rigone ht over Lucius’ head.

   “It is difficult being popular,” Lucius nodded solemnly. “I remember when I was your age and I was voted Prom King. The pressure was immense. When’s your dance? Soon, right? We’ll have to get you both fitted for tuxedos.”

   “Uh.”

   “Uh.”

   Lucius’ head snapped to look between the two boys he was charged with the care of. “What the hell is wrong with you two?” he demanded.

   “Well, I don’t know if you know this, but my _actual_ dad is in jail—“

   “No sarcasm past dinnertime,” Lucius reminded Theo sternly. “Let me clarify: what are you planning on for prom?”

   “ _I’m_ going,” Theo shrugged. Colin wanted to do the whole corsage and limousine thing for once, and Theo was sort of helpless in saying ‘no’ to him.

   Draco remained silent, averting his eyes. No matter how good he got at lying, Lucius could always tell what was up. At this point Draco had just stopped trying to lie and went with the ever-effective ‘pretend you don’t exist’ method.

   “ _Draco_.”

   “There’s no point to it!” Draco announced with an exasperated sigh. “What will I gain from watching my classmates bump and grind to songs I’ve already heard a thousand times before on the radio? Someone will spike the punch bowl. Do you really want your son around that debauchery?”

   Draco’s search history probably had more debauchery than a thousand proms combined, but Lucius didn’t know that. “It’s a rite of passage, Draco. It’s a tradition that you should be taking part of. What are you going to do instead, play your ogres and elves game?”

   “I am not!”

   “You are. Draco, games are for _children_.”

   Draco pressed his lips together. There was nothing more annoying than the way his father minimalized every facet of something that Draco had grown up with to a four-letter word. ‘Game’.

   Did he not think that Draco would do anything to make it real? It wasn’t Draco’s fault he was born into a boring world where his greatest accomplishment would probably be something mundane and pitiful in the eyes of an adventurer who had travelled over forsaken lands wielding mighty powers.

   Draco, in all honesty, could barely throw a punch.

   In the game he was stronger, faster, had magical abilities that sparked his wildest dreams…  Of course he preferred it to standing around a bunch of sweaty heterosexuals trying to lose their virginity. None of them were even dressed in embersilk robes or carrying sacred weapons of lost religions.

   If spending hours hooked up to a computer was the price to pay for a grand life beyond what Draco could ever achieve, then he would be the first to attach an IV to his computer router. He just didn’t need his father’s judgment to top it off. Lucius was always threatening to cancel his subscription, so Draco decided he had to act quickly.

   “I’m busy that night,” he tried, putting all his effort forth to get past Lucius’ internal lie detector.

   “With what? Where? With who?”

   “It’s a meeting,” Draco told him, grabbing the idea out of thin air. “Of gay teenagers. We’re doing our charity work for college together at an AIDS health clinic. It’s very important. AIDS, I mean. You know, it kills people.”

   Lucius stepped closer to his son, his eyes narrowing. “I’m aware, Draco,” he drawled.

   “It’s educational, too. You remember the eighties.”

   “Yes, I remember the eighties, Draco.” Lucius was now sure that Draco was giving him a load of bullshit, but at least that night Lucius could force his son out of the house to feasibly comingle with real, tangible people. At this point his grand standards for Draco really were centered on the whole ‘being an actual person’ thing.

   Draco considered himself victorious. “Wonderful! So I’ll be helping old queens and learning about struggle and such. Great plan. This is going to look marvelous to colleges.” He got into position to scamper back upstairs.

   “Draco,” Lucius quickly stopped him, leaning on the bannister.

   When he looked up at his son he saw the trouble lurking below the surface. He saw the anger under his skin right next to the loneliness behind his eyes. It killed him. It killed Lucius that he couldn’t really figure it out.

   He was Draco’s _father_. He was supposed to be the one who guided him through his teenage years with a steady hand with advice on girls and his future. When the ‘girls’ bit was revealed to be impossible, Lucius had stammered. He loved Draco all the same, but he had no idea how to proceed.

   Should he threaten Draco’s dates or should the parents of Draco’s dates be threatening Draco? Who was going to pay on dates? Should he advise Draco to get sexual experience in at this age or advise him to guard his virginity with his life? The absence of gender roles left Lucius in the dark.

   “Yeah?”

   “Sleep well, okay?” Lucius told him. It was the closest to ‘I love you’ that he could get with a witness in the other room. “Don’t stay up too late on that computer; it’s bad for your eyes.”

   “Okay, father.”

   “And don’t fall asleep with the television on again. It disturbs the sleep cycle.”

   “Okay, father.”

   “Brush your teeth, too.”

   “ _Okay, father_.”

   Lucius sighed and dismissed him. “Goodnight.”

   Without even replying, Draco sprinted back up to his room to keep the banter with Worgasm going.

XxXxX

   Harry was the designated balloon-holder, Neville presented the cake, Dean held the stuffed teddy-bear, and Seamus offered the flowers.

   It was all a part of Ron’s grand plan, one he’d made up two whole days ago.

   “Shh, shh!”

   “She’s coming?”

   “Right down the hall. Get behind the desk!”

   The non-gingers positioned themselves behind the desk in the pitch-black classroom. Someone’s elbow was in Harry’s side and he had no idea whose. Life was just dandy.

   Ms. Trelawney was the only teacher crazy enough to loan out their room to a bunch of strapping young lads with armfuls of gifts. Her eyes had widened when Ron asked like a pair of saucers. She said that this event was foretold in the stars, or some shit like that.

   Harry had gone through a star-reading phase. It really only served him a plate of disappointment when one more possibly magical thing didn’t work, and the stars were really just gas bubbles burning millions of miles away.

   “Ron?” Hermione tried, note in her left hand.

   It must have been important if Ron wrote a note instead of texting, and Hermione wanted to encourage a literary streak. “Ron, are you here?”

   “Come in,” Ron said in a voice that he probably thought was smooth but made Harry cringe. Hard.

   “What’s going on here? Why are the lights off?”

   Hermione’s right hand flew to the switch a bit faster than the boys behind the desk had expected, so their response was slightly delayed.

   “Prom!” they all shouted at once when they leapt up with Hermione’s gifts from Ron.

   “What?”

   Ron dropped to one knee like he was about to propose marriage. “Hermione Jean Granger, will you be my date to the prom?”

   “Oh, Ron,” she was blushing and glowing with excitement all at once. Ron was being sweet, and he’d gotten all of those gifts for her! “Of course I’m going to prom with you; you didn’t have to do all of this.”

   “I wanted to.”

   Harry tied the balloons—some shaped like hearts among the normal bunch—to Ms. Trelawney’s chair. Her shawl occupied the seat of it, which seemed very… Well, _her_.

   It seemed as if Ron’s plan had worked in his favor. Hermione crossed the classroom filled by desks to throw her arms around Ron and give him a big, eager kiss.

   “Heterosexuality,” Dean sighed with a tinge of disgust. “It burns.”

   “Hey now, those heterosexuals go through a lot,” Harry teased. “You know, with the marriage equality, job protection, housing protection, and how few straight characters are on television.”

   Hermione let out a girlish giggle and retracted from Ron. “Oh Harry, such a heterophobe.”

   “What can I say? This isn’t what Jesus wanted,” Harry laughed and motioned to the couple in front of him.

   “Amen,” Seamus agreed solemnly.

   “We’re living in sin,” Ron agreed. Even he thought making fun of straight people was sort of hilarious. It never happened outside of his friends poking fun, and it was altogether justified for the shit they’d put Ron’s friends through. “Hey, want to sneak into the Soho cinema tonight and watch some awful movies?”

   Everyone around Harry agreed without a second thought. They were young and free to be hooligans, of course they opted for an adventure. Harry, on the other hand, preferred his adventures online.

   It was safe there. He could lie without anyone seeing it on his face and he could ‘accidentally log off’ whenever he wanted. Harry stopped and started his adventures online in his own time and could predict most of the things that happened.

   “Harry?” Ron asked.

   “Dursleys want me to cut the grass,” he made up. Playing Cinderella was a good excuse for some alone time, as bad as it made him feel.

   He loved his friends! Harry saw Ron like a brother and Hermione had been there for him in the toughest times of his life. Dean and Seamus were fun albeit mushy, and Neville was a loyal guy who never let Harry down.

   Ron gave him a friendly pat on the back. “Want me to egg the house for you?”

   “I’m good,” Harry insisted. “You have fun.”

XxXxX

   Why hadn’t he gone out with his friends?

   Harry would have been having fun with them out in public, breathing air that hadn’t been recycled through the Dursley’s air-conditioning.

   He’d read somewhere that withdrawing from social events out of anxiety was probably a warning sign that something much, much bigger was going on in Harry’s head, but thinking about that only stressed him more.

   Even if Harry was fucked in the brain or something, how would he get treatment? Easy answer: he wouldn’t.

   The Dursleys had only taken him to the doctor once in his life, and that was when he had a broken arm.

**[Dragonis]: Hey.**

   Harry was so elated he actually made a small, pathetic noise. Thankfully, the Dursleys were consumed in whatever cooking show they were watching downstairs.

**[Worgasm]: Hey!**

   Oh, fuck. Was the exclamation point too eager?

**[Worgasm]: What’s up?**

**[Dragonis]: Do you want the short answer or the long answer?**

**[Worgasm]: All of the above.**

**[Dragonis]: Long answer: Well, my day started off with a math test I probably failed. That was followed up by my father suggesting more volunteer opportunities for me that I now have to go to because I lied that I was volunteering to get out of social events that I’d rather not discuss. It was all topped off with a cluster-fuck of homework that I just finished and the ever-present sound of my brother sucking face with his boyfriend in the other room.**

**[Dragonis]: Short answer: Oh, you know. I’m fine.**

**[Worgasm]: You have a brother?**

**[Dragonis]: Really?**

**[Dragonis]: I tell you all that and you choose to focus on that?**

**[Worgasm]: I was just surprised that your brother is gay, too.**

**[Dragonis]: He’s not actually my brother. It’s complicated but he lives with me and I can currently hear him trying to get to third base.**

Harry laughed. That all sounded so absurdly familiar, considering Vernon let girls go up to Dudley’s room to make whatever strange noises they wanted.

**[Worgasm]: Ew?**

**[Dragonis]: Definitely ew.**

**[Worgasm]: I am, alas, the only queer beneath my aunt and uncle’s roof.**

**[Dragonis]: I dunno, that annoying cousin you’re always bitching about definitely has a certain gay-arse vibe about him.**

**[Worgasm]: No!**

**[Worgasm]: If he was gay I could never be gay again! What if I ran into him at a club?  That’s practically my worst nightmare.**

   Who was this bloke? Draco loved the way he thought. It was so dark and twisted over oddly specific things that it almost mirrored Draco’s. Their idiosyncrasies would never line up, but he understood how Harry felt about them.

**[Dragonis]: Want to hear an absolute horror story?**

**[Worgasm]: Always.**

**[Dragonis]: I’ve run into my ethics teacher in a gay club.**

**[Worgasm]: Oh my god, that is funny on like twelve different levels.**

**[Dragonis]: It was hardly funny at the time! I was out with my friends trying to have an ill-advised night of teenage rebellion and there I am, staring right at the back of his stupid, bald head. He usually wore a turban, I’m not sure why, it definitely wasn’t part of his religion…**

   Wow, what a whacky coincidence. Harry’s old ethics teacher had worn a turban that he never seemed to address.

**[Worgasm]: Did he see you?**

**[Dragonis]: Thankfully, no. I was sprinting away too quickly for anyone to see me.**

**[Worgasm]: Wow. Wow, wow, wow.**

**[Dragonis]: Shut up.**

**[Worgasm]: It’s admittedly much more thrilling than anything that’s happened to me.**

**[Dragonis]: Wait, not all orphans go on fantastical journeys and are chosen as saviors of the world?**

**[Worgasm]: Honestly, I wish. Also: you’re a prick and it would not be that interesting of a story. I already know what got my parents killed.**

**[Dragonis]: Killed?**

**[Dragonis]: You don’t have to tell me. I’m an arse. A huge one.**

**[Dragonis]: Absolutely colossal arse who says the wrong shit involving serious situations.**

**[Dragonis]: Yep.**

   Harry let him sweat for a little while. This bloke was walking a dangerous line here with asking Harry questions. When people showed an interest in him he had a tendency of latching on.

**[Worgasm]: My dad was a copper, my mum was a nurse. My dad got too close to a case surrounding a kingpin and it didn’t end well for anyone. I was just a baby.**

**[Dragonis]: Oh. I’m sorry.**

**[Worgasm]: It’s alright. I don’t remember a thing.**

**[Dragonis]: Still.**

**[Worgasm]: Thanks.**

   A few minutes went by, but it was more companionable than Draco expected. Harry’s character was still moving from zone to zone, so Draco had not reduced a guy he liked online to a wreck of emotions by bringing up something so painful.

   ‘Tact’ was rare for Draco. He maintained elegance and poise, but the second he opened his mouth all of that was lost. People who weren’t as privileged as him just tripped him up, he guessed.

**[Worgasm]: Want to go down Nalak?**

   Nalak was the great cloud-serpent of The Thundering Isle. He was Lord of Storms in Pandaria and had a player-versus-player specialized necklace that Harry’s character needed.

**[Dragonis]: Yeah, definitely. I’ll put the advert out in trade chat?**

**[Worgasm]: Awesome. Oh, and one more thing.**

**[Dragonis]: Yeah?**

**[Worgasm]: I mean, this is cheesy now, but if you’re ever having a bad day again (believe me, I have tons of them) then just let me know. You don’t deserve to be upset.**

**[Dragonis]: You don’t even know me. How do you know what I deserve?**

**[Worgasm]: Okay, let’s make some lists.**

   Draco could have cried. He _loved_ lists.

**[Worgasm]: Things I do not know about you: Your name, your age (though I’m guessing high school), or what you look like.**

**[Worgasm]: Things I do know about you: You’re a rare mix of boisterous followed up by sensitive. I laugh when you type things. I dunno. You haven’t really shown me anything worthy of not having someone to talk to.**

**[Worgasm] has invited you to a party. Accept or decline?**

   Draco accepted the request quickly.

**[Party][Worgasm]: I’ll start inviting people from my guild. You have assist.**

   What.

   How could someone say something so kind and then move on as if it was completely normal?

**Tantillo has joined the party.**

**[Party][Tantillo]: Let’s murder some baddies, yo.**

   And all the killing in the game! How was Worgasm okay with that?

**Swiftfoot has joined the party.**

**Greener has joined the party.**

**[Worgasm]: I’ll get a warlock down here so we can start summoning you guys. Dragonis, can you help him summon?**

**[Dragonis]: I’m on it.**

   As confusing as it was, Draco played on.


	5. Point of No Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SMUT TIME

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, it’s time for what I like best: Not safe for work fabulosity. It’s time to get weird and internet kinky with these two boys since they still have no idea who the other one is and all I want Harry to be thinking when he meets Draco in person is “oh my effing god I cybered him I totally cybered Draco Malfoy”. Also oh my gosh I am applying to college and it’s very exciting!

**Chapter 5: Point of No Return**

   Draco actually sort of did not suffer as much as he thought he would.

   Sure, the place smelled like a hospital and was vaguely reminiscent of death, but Draco had actually met some really cool people.

   Sure, they were also all over the age of forty, but that was a given. Draco hadn’t expected a group of teenagers at the MildMay inpatient treatment center and an ensuing romance with a male nurse or something.

   He also hadn’t expected to find the residents of MildMay to be so interesting.

   His favorite was Julian Pino who had been known as Miss Marmalade in his stage days. He sold out every night he performed at his local clubs all dolled up in his highest drag to belt out classics and make dirty jokes that made the crowd cheer.

   That same crowd would form a cluster around Julian’s dressing room, declaring their love and adoration. Men absolutely lost their minds to get with the star of the show.

_“One guy left his wife for me,” Julian had bragged. “She came to my flat and started screaming about how I’d corrupted her saintly, godly husband.”_

_The next man who spoke had a thick Scottish accent. “Oi, what have I told you about the sanctity of marriage?” Henry Lyle was really only half-joking. He had been a copper on the force when the sodomy laws were still in effect and he had no real love for institutions._

_As one of the only married men there (the ceremony had been in Canada, but he liked to think it was law in England without the actual facts to back that up), Bruce Jensen was inclined to speak up. “All I can hear is ‘Always a bridesmaid, never a bride…’.”_

_“I’m waiting for my custom dress from Vera Wang,” Julian explained._

_“And the man to go along with it?”_

_“Beyond irrelevant.”_ Apparently ‘Miss’ Marmalade would be sticking around.

   Draco had watched the whole exchange with a sort of enraptured curiosity.

_“We’re scaring the boy,” Henry had sighed in reference to Draco, giving the man sitting next to him at the table a tap with his foot._

_“Scared? I’m not scared,” Draco said bravely. He was at the head of a wedding-cake-white table in a hospice surrounded by graying gay men with AIDS. His father had been especially weary when he dropped Draco off, but these guys were actually sort of… Cool?_

_“Be kind to the baby gay,” Julian hushed Henry before turning to Draco. “You know, they’re always bringing your sort in. Snotty boys brimming with youth.” He made a disgusted noise. “Your beauty makes me envious.”_

_“Uh. Thanks?”_

_The men laughed. Hey, at least Draco was doing his job and cheering them up. That was what the brochure had encouraged, to befriend the patients and make them feel like they had someone to confide in. It was sure better than picking up trash at the side of the road to chip in some community service, anyway._

_“So,” Draco tried. How the hell was he supposed to relate to these guys? Just start blabbering about Judy Garland and hope they were culture queens? “How are—“ Before Draco could so much as finish his sentence, his phone buzzed in his back pocket._

_Like a true child of the technological age, he stopped everything to see who was on the other side of the screen._

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Hey, do you have any time to talk?**

_Apparently, Draco was smiling or something stupid like that because the three grown men around the table ooh-ed and ah-ed._

_“I remember when romance was hand-written,” Bruce sighed. He and Jonathan used to write to each other all the time even when they lived together. Bruce saved every last letter in a little box, and he read them still when he was in his hospital room alone. It was tough getting in a car with Bruce being so tired all the time, so he rarely got to visit the actual grave._

_Draco looked up from his phone and wondered a little more about what the brochure said._

_There was, apparently, a unique kind of experience that baby gays could have in the presence of their elders. Said elders could educate them on LGBTQ history from actually being there when it happened and offer timeless advice. Draco gave them a crack at their advice-giving skills right then and there._

_“Did you at least know their name back then?”_

_“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” Julian answered honestly. “I still don’t know the name of the man who infected me.”_

_“What?” Draco asked incredulously. How could you not know the name of someone who changed your life so permanently?_

   Apparently Julian just never asked. It was a noncommittal climate and he figured he’d never see the man again after one sizzling hot night backstage at a night club.

   Draco looked down at his phone screen and continued to fret. Lucius had picked him up from MildMay with eager questions in the car in attempt to relate to Draco, but he’d gotten even worse feedback than usual.

_“Did you have fun?”_

_“I guess.”_

_“Did you learn anything?”_

_“I guess.”_

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You there?**

   Goddammit. There were so many conversations past, present, and virtual going on around Draco that he couldn’t keep it all straight.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Yeah, I’m here.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Hey.**

   Draco stowed himself away in his room where even Theo was reluctant to go when he’d come home in such a strange mood. Draco was always in some mood or another, but this sort seemed dangerous to interfere with for fear of suffering the wrath of the dragon boy. Video games gave him a sort of heightened sense of self, especially in terms of how he used his anger.

   Feeling confused and still hearing Bruce’s hoarse laugh from years of what had to be cigar smoking before he was diagnosed, Draco thought up a reply.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Hey. So I’m guessing you’re looking for stability or someone sane to talk to right now, but I don’t know if I can be that right now. Do you ever have days where everything feels like it’s all just too much? Today is that. Sorry.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Today is also that for me; I know exactly what you mean. That generally sick and shitty feeling for no reason and you feel like a huge inconvenience to everyone and you can’t stop thinking about like three or four stupid comments someone else made that day.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Yes, yes, yes.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: We’re both sort of fucked up, hm?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Beyond.**

   Draco considered something sort of crazy.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: And every time I get like this and talk to someone the words never come out right. I always wind up regretting whatever I said.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Looking over the chat transcripts when I’m a depressed little shit is honestly torture. What are you thinking?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Have you ever heard of faking it until you make it?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I have a Death Knight side character.**

   That pretty much explained itself. Death Knights were so entirely over-powered thanks to the game developers, and they packed one hell of a punch with damage. The only downside? Only about three people in the game knew how to play them correctly. Everyone else was a button-mashing nightmare pretending to know what they were doing and getting away with it because of the Death Knight’s natural power.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Right, ha. So do you want to try?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I had a wonderful day with my aunt and uncle. They listened to me when I spoke and they didn’t laugh when my cousin’s friend called me a fag and refused to sit next to me for dinner.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I also had a super fun day that wasn’t filled with anything close to disturbing revelations in a nursing home-type thing. Life is so grand, Worgasm.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I have something to admit.**

   Draco frowned, looking down at the screen nervously.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Yes?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’m not actually a werewolf masquerading as a teenage boy. Alas, it is the other way around. I hope this doesn’t disappoint our plans to yiff.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Make one more furry joke. I dare you.**

   It was the funniest kink in the world, and Draco couldn’t help if it made him laugh.

   Sometimes he’d see people walking around with tails and ears at gay pride events and he’d have to literally cover his mouth to keep from chuckling in their faces. Sure, Draco liked the idea of being a Dom who consensually humiliated men in high heels, but he wasn’t under the impression that he was actually an animal. That seemed pretty fargone.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I was going to say something about Bad Dragon, so I pulled up the home page for ideas and went onto the site… Biggest mistake of my life. Oh my god. Go look at it right now.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You have to look at this. I feel like I’m hallucinating this.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Taking me down with you, hm? Fine.**

   Opening up an incognito tab felt sketchy enough, but typing in the address to a website for dragon dildos—oh yes, you heard correctly. Dildos shaped like dragon dicks, or whatever humans imagined dragon dicks to be shaped like—was a bit far.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: FUCK**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: FUCKIGN UFKC FUCK FUCKFCUFKC**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I HATE YOU OH MY GOD I’M NEVER GETTING THIS IMAGE OUT OF MY HEAD**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’m assuming you’ve found the penis of ‘Fannar the Emperor’. It’s on sale, so.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: YOU’RE THE WORST**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: LURING ME INTO SERIOUS CONVERSATION AND FOLLOWING IT UP WITH DRAGON COCKS**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?**

   Harry’s laughter had gotten so loud that even Dudley was yelling for him to shut the hell up. He could only imagine the shock and horror on this poor bloke’s face. The first time Harry had seen the site he was horrified, but he wasn’t even aware of some of the wildest examples of sex toy creativity until that very day.

   The site was basically a joke shared by the internet excepting the few that actually wanted to stick sharp, bumpy, pointy tentacles and deformed pricks made of silicone up their naughty bits, and Harry was glad he’d found someone who found the damn thing as funny as he did.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Yes. Yes it was.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Oh my god. Look at the fucking otter cock.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: OTTER. COCK.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: There is a market out there for this exact item. ‘Luka the Otter’ is in high demand. This would never happen in Azeroth.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Oh, please. They’d have real dragons to base the dildos off of.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Ack. I revoke my previous statement and return to the fetal position and crying. How are any of these even mildly pleasurable? They’re sharp. They’re sharp!**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I wish I had an answer for you.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Sharp.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I feel like I’ve broken you. This was a bad idea.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: SHARP**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Do I need to link you to some human porn to get your mind off of this?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: YES**

   Harry hadn’t actually expected him to say ‘yes’, but there it was on the screen all pixelated and such. Hm. Should he go through the archives of downloads that he password-protected in his phone?

   Time to take a shot in the dark, he supposed. If he and Dragonis could pretend to be normal then maybe they could pretend that sending porn to one another was normal.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: TasteOfLeather.mov (attachment)**

   Draco’s jaw dropped. It was scandalous and sort of hot even just from the name of the porno. Draco turned down his volume and opened the attached file with a certain flutter in his stomach.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Oh my god.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Okay, so I guess now it’s my turn to say I screwed up?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I shouldn’t have sent that one. Sorry.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: No, I mean: oh my god I’ve seen this one before.**

   It was one of his favorites, too. A brutal, muscular man being tied down and whipped until he came? That was the height of perfect pornography and could really only be improved by a little cross-dressing.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You’re kidding me.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Nope. That’s sort of right up my alley.**

   Well. That was interesting.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Really?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Of course. There’s honestly nothing hotter.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I never took you for a masochist.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Oh, my sweet, sweet Worgasm. You’re right. I’m positively awful when it comes to taking pain and I’m a real bitch when it comes to insults. I’m more interested in the role of dishing it out.**

   Harry didn’t realize he’d started to shift in his covers until he tried to cross his legs. He felt the beginnings of arousal and blamed it on the porn he sent. The memories of watching it were still pretty vivid, and if he closed his eyes he could still hear the submissive gasping and groaning around the Dom’s cock.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I should have figured that.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: What, you haven’t already wanked over the thought of me beating you in combat and having my way with you? I’m sorely offended.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I never said I hadn’t thought about that.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: There’s just usually more subs than there are Doms online.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Aw, and you’ve even gone and capitalized my title. You’ve been into this for a while?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Yeah. It feels kind of weird to say but I think I’ve always known that’s what I wanted. When I turned twelve the internet just filled in the blanks of what actually happened between two blokes who were into that.**

   The first porn he’d seen of it wasn’t even that good. It was some bored-looking twink being tossed over the lap of some famous muscle guy or another and being spanked until his arse turned bright red and then being thrown onto a dingy old bed and getting fucked.

   The camera was shaking the whole time and the audio on the spanks was off.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I’ve known since I was young, too. I liked playing the prince when all the kids would dress up and play pretend because I loved to order all the other little boys around.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I keep imagining your blood elf sitting on a throne.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: That’s because he definitely does 24/7. Now bring me a chocolate soufflé and rub my feet.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: And what makes you think I want you to boss me around?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Please. You know you’d be a lucky one to serve me. There are plenty of subs crawling around on here, but there’s only one of me. I’d discipline you just like you need before I rewarded you.**

   Harry inhaled sharply. Was this bloke for real? Either way the whole conversation was making quite the tent in Harry’s pants.

   He was tempted to move the hand that wasn’t typing down there to rub at himself.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Now I need discipline?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: You’ve been a very bad boy; I keep bad boys in line and all of that. But for now you sound like you had a tough day, so if I were there I’d probably just hold you.**

   Draco smirked. He was flirting with danger here and didn’t have any intention of stopping. He’d talked dirty online before and it had led to some of the best fantasy situations—some better than the actual in-person sex he had—and a rush of endorphins.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’d really, really like that.**

   Harry ignored the little shake in his hands along the keys of the keyboard and kept typing.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Though my bed would probably be too small for it.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: So I’d sneak you up into my bed. It’s huge and usually empty, and you could feel like some Romeo when you scaled the side of the house to get in.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Are you for real right now?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Yes.**

   Slumping back into his bed, Harry carefully undid the tie on his sweatpants. It couldn’t hurt anyone since Dragonis couldn’t see him, right? And with the way the other man was talking, it seemed he almost wanted to drive Harry up the wall.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: And then what?**

   Draco had him hook, line and sinker. In his own cocoon of blankets he started rubbing his cock through the layers of fabric, closing his eyes to imagine what he really would do if this (hopefully gorgeous) man was in his bed and he had the house all to himself.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Then I’d turn you on your side, spoon you and make sure you’re warm in the blankets. Do your shoulders feel sore?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Almost always.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Then I would pull the collar of your shirt down and kiss them. You sound like you could use a good massage.**

   With a quiet sigh Harry curled up on his side and imagined it was really happening. He felt the other man’s warm hands against his skin, and imagined the blankets in his bed to be infinitely softer than his own.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I really could. I’m a complete whore for massages, honestly. People are always telling me I have knots no matter what.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I would work them out in no time and once you were relaxed I’d move the massage down lower. I’d rub the small of your back, free up those hips you’ve probably got locked from hours of playing the game.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You’re sort of dead on with that one.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I really do wish you were here.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: What would you want me to do next?**

   Harry hesitated. Should he really tell this man what he was thinking? Would he be shut down? Harry figured it was a risk that he needed to take if he was going to get anywhere with this. That, and Harry was much more brave online with his advances.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’d probably want to do something for you, then. Help you take off your shirt to get you more comfortable, something like that…**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: ‘Something like that’? You don’t have to be so shy. I’d let you take it off and I’d want yours off, too.**

   Well, he had said that he didn’t want Harry to be so shy, so he went for it with one hand down the front of his pants under the covers.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Believe me, I would comply. So I could feel your arms around my waist and your chest against my back.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Oh, so you’d like it from behind?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: To be honest, I don’t know. I’ve never really gone past kissing with anyone.**

   There it was, The Virgin Bomb. Harry held his breath.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Would you let me get past kissing?**

   Would he? Harry honestly didn’t know the answer himself. If this Dragonis really was some other lost London teenager, then he’d surely give it a shot. If he hadn’t been lying, if all of what he’d told Harry had been real—then he would be glad to.

   It sort of felt like the teenage romance Harry thought he would never get because of his sexuality. This bloke could be ten minutes away from his house for all he knew though. Somehow they’d found each other and if they ever met in person then Harry wouldn’t let him get away so easily.

   Harry thought out what he planned on saying with a strange idea of sitting in a posh living room with whoever Dragonis was—Harry hoped he was blonde—and his ‘brother’ playing a board game or something. Companionship and love seemed inches from his fingertips.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Depends. I’m not really looking for someone to snog and leave. I think, especially with you, I’d want something that could maybe mean something and last.**

   That was the final nail in Draco’s coffin. He had one hell of a crush on this guy no matter who he was, and now they’d past the point of no return. Draco had feelings. Gay, mushy _feelings_.

   He also had gay, hard feelings in his cock, but that was almost secondary for the moment.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I’d make your first time special, I promise. I’d get you facing me before I finally kissed you and I would go as slowly as you needed me to. In the past I’ve always felt rushed, but with you I’d take my time.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Such a gentleman.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I am a gentleman, my lady. I’d just be glad to be in your skirts.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You’re crazy. I love it.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I think there are a lot of things I can do for you that you’ll love.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Tell me everything.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: After I would get your lips all puffy and red from sucking on them, I’d give you a quick bite before trailing my kisses down your chest. There, I’d use my tongue to make sure your nipples were nice and perky for me.**

   Harry’s pants had been pushed down to his knees. Phone in one hand and prick in the other, he let out a small groan at the idea of some beautiful man getting him hot and bothered and felt his nipples actually hardened at the thought.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: This is so hot. You’re so hot.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Flattery will get you everywhere with me, yes.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Then I’d tell you how gorgeous you look on top of me. If you wanted to, you could probably make me beg for more.**

   The phrase ‘on top of me’ was enough to send a spike of chills through Draco’s body. He stroked himself up and down, mind flashing forward to all sorts of fun he could be having on top of the other man.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: You’re assuming that you can still form coherent thoughts when my teeth run down your chest, which is awfully confident of you. I wonder what you’d say when I lowered your trousers down and gave your cock a kiss through your pants?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I’d definitely be incoherent at that point, actually.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: That’s what I thought.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I’d get your pants wet from lapping at your cock until I finally wanted to taste it. Then your pants would be gone in a flash. How long are you?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Uh, I’ve never measured it.**

   Total lie. He’d measured it before and made a fake yahoo answers account to see if it was average.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Hm. You’ll have to later for accuracy’s sake. Or maybe I’ll have you over and see for myself.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Anyway. Once you were naked I probably wouldn’t be able to get enough of you. I’d slide my hands down the inside of your soft thighs and part them, spreading your legs open. What would you want me to do first?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Whatever you wanted. I’d be all yours.**

   Harry’s mind skipped to him being taken advantage of by the other man, made to feel used and open with the other man’s cock. He’d never wanted it so badly before.

   Maddeningly, Harry tugged at himself and bit back the noises spilling from his mouth so that the Dursleys couldn’t hear.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: So trusting. I’d reward you for that by sucking the head and making my way down until all of your length was in my mouth. My hands would pin your hips to the bed so you’d be helpless to move, and I’d suck you from base to tip as slowly as I could. I’d drive you wild.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Fuck.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: And when I got you whimpering and begging for me to finish you off, I’d let you slide out of my mouth and I’d move on to your tight arsehole. Tell me, have you ever thought about a man eating you out?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Yes. Hell, I dream about it.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Good. Then I’d give you what you’ve been dreaming of. I’d snog your arsehole until you were open enough for me to slide a finger in.**

   Draco was actually salivating at the thought of licking that virgin hole. It’d be so tight when he forced his prick in, and the man below him would make such pretty noises at the intrusion. He’d gasp and struggle, trying his best to fight back the pain, but Draco would ease deeper and deeper into him.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Would you want me in you?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: I would. I’d ask you to go gently, spread me open with your fingers first and whatever lube you have at home before you pushed in.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: I can only imagine how fucking gorgeous you’d look when I unzip my trousers and nudge my prick at that pink opening. I’d kiss your neck and make sure it didn’t hurt too bad, but I’d still want you in a little pain. I’d be heavy on top of you, keeping you right where I wanted you with my body.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Fuck, I want you so bad. I’d push back onto you, I’d ask for more even when it did hurt.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Mm, of course. When you got used to my thrusts in and out of you and I finally got used to how perfect your arse looks with my cock buried in it, then I’d wrap my hand back around your prick and rub.**

   Harry moaned into his blankets. Pre-come dribbled down the sides of his cock, willing him to push up faster and faster into his own hand.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Oh, hell. I think I’m gonna come.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Then do it. Come with my dick up your arse so I can feel you lose it around me. I’d only fuck you harder for it and fill you up with my come seconds later.**

   Draco seared his eyes shut and focused. He saw himself thrusting into a slender, dark-haired man who was shuddering around him from the mix of pain and pleasure. He put his phone down for a moment to pump with both hands, his orgasm hitting him like a tidal wave and getting all over the sheets.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Fuck, fuck, fuck.**

   On Harry’s end, he was shaking with the after-effects of one of the best climaxes in his life. Maybe it was even the best one. His glasses had fogged and his blankets were ruined, but it was beyond worth it.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Why didn’t we think of doing this sooner?**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: You thought I was a tortilla chip, remember?**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Fair point.**

   Harry’s breathing still hadn’t evened out when he typed his next question.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: Would you consider doing this in person next time? With all of that long-term intention stuff.**

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: You don’t have to say yes, I just need to know before I start to obsess over you.**

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Madd Gaming Café in Soho, next Saturday night, 7pm.**

   Harry’s fingers couldn’t type fast enough to get his eager response in.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: See you then.**


	6. Half

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One of my hobbies is making fun of Theodore Nott 24/7, oh man. I hope you guys like him as much as I do. Now let’s get Draco and Harry in the same room again!

**Chapter 6: Half**

   Draco had changed outfits three times before alerting Worgasm as to what he would be wearing through a quick whisper in the game. He’d kept it open while he was getting changed and had flown his blood elf to Karazhan so he could hear his favorite raid music of all time.

   It was a dark, delightful waltz that was distinctly harlequin in origins.

   Draco twirled around to it when he finally decided on the red shirt with the Horde symbol etched onto it, a pair of tight jeans, and a black collared leather jacket that he had just received for Christmas. It was lined with some sort of fur that Draco never bothered thinking about. So many rabbits had already died for his earmuffs that winter.

   Luckily, it wasn’t snowing or raining so he could get away with a coat, scarf, and gloves. He’d have to find an excuse to take the gloves off, of course, so he could reach out and touch the man he’d been talking to.

   Talking dirty to.

   Nothing had been quite as intense as that one night he’d spent under the sheets with his phone hooked up to its charger, but things between him and Worgasm had gotten distinctly more flirtatious. It was like they had both been nervous about whether or not the other man liked them so they held back all that time. The flood gates had opened after that night, and it felt so right.

   They teased each other like they were lovers across chat screens and raids they performed together. They were an excellent team and they never failed to get that banter and bickering up at just the right level of snippy and affectionate.

   Draco recalled one particularly instance where the other man had called him ‘gorgeous’ like it was his name.

   _Hey, gorgeous, can you freeze these guys so we can get the achievement?_

   How could Draco focus on spells when he was being complimented so?

   “You _sure_ you don’t want me to go with you?” Theo sighed from his place perched on Draco’s bed. “I wouldn’t stick around to babysit or whatever.”

   “I’m sure.”

   Theodore Nott was always of the distinct opinion that Draco Malfoy was out of his mind, but nothing made him more anxious than when Draco agreed to meet these strangers in person. “Text me when you get there.”

   Draco snorted as he adjusted his jacket in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet. “Sure, mum.”

   “Don’t get into a car if he has one—“

   “I know!”

   “Just text me the license number so I can look it up—“

   “Theo.” Draco turned around and put his hands on his friend’s shoulders. “I can handle this.” He was the one who had been in control of their fooling around. Draco had started it and he could have ended it whenever he wanted.

   The taller man curled his lip up with doubt. “It’s not you I don’t trust, Draco,” he grumbled, eyes flicking across Draco’s pale face.

   That was… Sort of nice. Draco never had a biological sibling so he figured this was the closest he could get. “How about,” Draco offered. “I walk in there, meet him, if I feel anything is off I go into the bathroom, and I call you?”

   “Then I beat the shit out of him?”

   “Then you beat the shit out of him.”

   Theo shrugged. “I can live with that,” he decided.

   Draco cracked a smile. “Good.” He went back to the mirror to fix his hair so it looked carefully disheveled. “And I’ll text you when I get there.”

   “Where am I telling Lucius you are?” Theo grinned. Their history of covering for each other was not about to end just yet.

   “Hm. Say I’ve gone to some university open house for applicants only where I talk to current students and form bonds and make connections or something,” Draco told him. That sounded slightly reasonable and responsible enough to throw his father off of his trail. “I’ll be back around… Hm. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

   He felt sort of giddy about that.

   “But you should probably be worried if I’m not here by morning.”

   “Oh, joy,” Theo deadpanned.

   Draco gave him a little huff before kissing his cheek goodbye. “Go kiss your boyfriend or something. Does kindergarten run on Saturdays?”

   “He is literally sixteen. Sixteen. _Sixteen_!”

   “Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Draco shrugged.

   “I swear to fuck if this bloke you’re meeting is even three seconds older or younger than you I’m never going to let you forget it either,” he vowed to Draco before devolving into little laughs. “You know, I’ve been worried this whole time that this bloke is like fifty, but what if he’s twelve or something?”

   “Are you missing the part where we wanked off together?”

   “Are you forgetting what it was like to be twelve?” he questioned Draco. They were both—believe it or not—even hornier back then. Let that sink in. There was a point in Draco Malfoy’s life when he was somehow even more desperate for it than he already was.

   Adolescence was beautiful.

   “I remember it and my hand still has blisters from it,” Draco snarked as he strolled out of his room and down the stairs. “But we’re past that, hm? We’ve got men to do that for us.”

   “I have a man,” Theo corrected, pointing a finger at himself for emphasis as he followed Draco to the door. “You have words on a screen who could possibly be the work of a twelve year-old.”

   Draco rolled his eyes. “We’ll see about that after tonight,” he said before opening the door. He was just about to shut it behind himself when Draco thought of a last minute dig. “And you have a man-child.”

   After that, Theo gladly shut the door for him.

XxXxX

   The tea sat snugly in Harry’s hands and warmed them from the nippy weather outside. He’d climbed out of his window to make sure the Dursleys didn’t suspect anything and the walk to the metro was terribly chilly.

   Harry used his phone’s camera to get a good look at himself. Just as Harry had suspected, the tips of his nose and ears were red from the cold. Why did he have to be so pale?

   In hopes of remedying his Rudolph nose, Harry sipped more warm tea and receded into his coat slightly. From the other side of the room, a crowd of girls with tight ponytails screeched with delight around a computer screen where their alpha female had just taken down some dungeon-master or other boss.

   “Yes! Fuckin’ killed him!” one of the girls shouted. “I’m the queen!”

   Harry smiled. He knew what that rush was like.

**[Mobile][Dragonis]: Be there in five.**

His thumbs flew to the keys. This was really happening. Harry was really meeting a bloke he liked and who could snog him during the loading screens when he logged on to World of Warcraft.

   They could be the best of friends and lovers all at once. This man could be Harry’s first, his future boyfriend in University, his fiancée, his husband one day and they could tell the kids that they met on a fantasy game. They had both been looking for magic and goddammit, they had found it.

   Harry stopped himself there. He sort of had to meet the bloke first before he went on planning weddings and baby showers.

   He couldn’t help if he clung to commitment; Harry had never had anyone who wanted to commit to him before.

   The idea that this abstract, beautiful man could want him was overwhelming. It made Harry feel naïve and inexperienced, too. Like somehow there could be something he was missing in his equation of this Magical and Perfect Man, but Harry wasn’t sure what it was.

**[Mobile][Worgasm]: See you soon.**

   Harry’s heart hammered in his chest.

   He watched the minutes tick by—one by one by one by one—with white knuckles forming from how tightly he gripped the phone. It was his tether to the other man.

   With a promise to himself not to look up at the door with each customer that came in, Harry listened intently to people walking in and out of the café. He didn’t want to get his hopes up and look like a complete and utter loser when the man who walked in was just another thirty-something out for drinks with his friends.

   Still, the whole thing made Harry’s breath feel short. He shuddered and shook around his cup of tea with phantom chills at the thought that he could meet this wonderful man who was both his age and his type.

   He’d told Dragonis that he would be wearing his navy-blue coat and black jeans, so he really hoped that would be enough of a description.

   Finally, the café door opened and Harry just _knew_ who it was.

   The world went silent, containing the only two people that mattered. No more battle cries or arcade-game beeps from the other side of the room. Harry couldn’t even hear the low, ambient music that had been playing in the café to set some mood or something. It was a popular song, but Harry couldn’t tell which.

   There was the clack of heels on the wooden floor, a thick heel on the back of a pair of black shoes. The strides were long but confident—almost thrilled.

   “Hey.”

   Harry turned around as he spoke. “Hey,” he replied eagerly before he really even got a proper look at the other man.

   If the world had been frozen before, in that moment it was a block of solid ice.

   The realization hit Harry in waves, crashing over him as he and Draco stared at each other with lowered jaws.

   It was Draco Malfoy.

   Harry had been playing with Draco Malfoy.

   All of the things Dragonis had said about his father, his family life, his problems—those all belonged to Draco.

   And finally: Holy shit, he’d sexted Draco Malfoy.

   There was no way that Draco wasn’t Dragonis, actually. The name should have given it away for Harry and he felt utterly foolish for that, but there was that tall, blonde, delicious slice of cake standing right in front of Harry in a World of Warcraft T-shirt.

   Meanwhile, similar things sped through Draco’s head.

   “You…? You—!” he sputtered out. “What are you doing here?” Draco knew what he was doing there, but he didn’t want to believe it. He looked around to make sure nobody from school was there to see this. “Please tell me you just walked in here by coincidence.”

   Harry couldn’t force a word out of his mouth in response to either lie or tell the truth.

   “Oh, _fuck_.”

   Draco had no idea what to do with his hands or his body as if it all suddenly wasn’t his own. He was in a stranger’s skin and he had no idea how to operate this odd new vehicle.

   “Your parents,” Draco murmured in a hushed tone. He’d never known how Harry’s parents had died, he’d always figured it was cancer or a car crash or something wildly mundane.

   The mention of Harry’s parents was the slap on the back Harry needed to get talking. “Your parents!” he countered. “Your fucking—“ Harry lowered his voice, “— _brother_?” It had been Theo all along. It was bad enough that the sod was dating Colin. Colin had even been convinced that Draco was a decent human being somehow.

   “You cannot tell anyone at school anything. I can’t believe you would do this, play some sick fucking joke—If you say a word about anything I said to you, if you so much breathe it in Granger or Weasley’s ears a fucking syllable—Let’s just say I have enough dirt on you to get people’s minds off of my dysfunctions,” Draco snarled, defenses flying up like walls around him.

   “What the hell are you talking about?” Harry demanded. “You think I did this to you as a prank or some shit?”

   “Obviously! You’ve been out to get me since day one!”

   “That’s because you’ve been an arse since day one!” Harry snapped.

   Draco let out a disgusted sigh. “So you did do this just to get in my pants. I should have known. You’ve always been so in creepy lust with me, Potter.”

   “I didn’t do this for you! I was just playing a game!”

   People around them were starting to stare, but most of the gamers were absorbed in the words on their screens with headphones plugging up their ears and protecting them from the real world where two boys who thought they’d had something special were pointing fingers at one another.

   “Oh, please!” Draco scoffed, crossing his arms. “You think I don’t notice the way you look at me? You think you’re so damn holy, but you judge and you observe and you love what you fucking see.”

   Harry’s face reddened and he lowered his voice to a growl. Who did Draco think he was? “This was not for you. I have had that account since I was a kid.”

   “Prove it!”

   “Want to see my forty-main Ahn’Qiraj achievements as one of the first raids in the game?” Harry demanded, whipping out his phone and pulling up his character’s page from the armory app. “Or how about I show you the chat logs that date back to the fucking 2000’s? Do you want to see my holiday mounts, my transmog gear, my Loremaster title? Or here—have a look at this! Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Goddamn Windseeker! That’s epic loot and you know it. Fuck you if you think I’d do all that for you.”

   Draco gritted his teeth. It was almost embarrassing how he knew the scale of every one of those in-game accomplishments. That took dedication and time, and Draco hadn’t run Ahn’Qiraj since he was in primary school.

   Harry lowered his phone. “Believe me now?” he questioned.

   “Fine, whatever, you’ve had the account for a long time. Am I really expected to believe that you just happened to run into me in-game?” Maybe Harry had heard Draco played WoW from someone else and gone after him purposefully.

   “Run into you?” Harry laughed. “You killed me, if you don’t recall! I was minding my own business when you had to swoop out of the sky and zerg me!”

   Oh. Right. Now it was Draco’s turn to be flustered. “How was I supposed to know that was you?”

   “How was I supposed to know that you were you?” Harry argued. His shakes hadn’t died down in the slightest and things going south had only made them worse. He dropped his phone onto the metal table with a ‘clang’, palms sweaty from holding it.

   Draco was at a loss for words. This was the funny, sweet man he’d talked to for a month. He’d told that man about his day after the bell rang at school.

   “This is so fucked,” Harry muttered, full to the brim with some unspeakable anger.

   He’d been betrayed. The world had promised him a fresh start with a caring mystery man and laughed in his face when he asked nicely for it.

   “You’re a bully. You intimidate people, you make them feel small, and it’s all for your own shitty self-esteem,” Harry spoke again with conviction. “You’ve got privilege dripping from your every cell, Malfoy. You’re rich and you have no idea what it’s like to struggle for money, struggle for love—You’ve got your parents and they _adore_ your sorry arse no matter what you do.”

   “So now I’m supposed to apologize for you having a worse life than me? You have no idea what I went through when I came out to my father! You have no idea what my family has been through together, and you can’t sit there and judge me.” Draco’s voice got distinctly higher with stress.

   Harry shook his head. “You’re not supposed to apologize.” As usual, he really only heard one half of what Draco said. “You’re supposed to be grateful, kind, and unpretentious. That’s like—that’s the base of being a decent person!”

   “You are so full of it. You get to decide who’s a ‘decent person’ now? Would you have let me talk about fucking you if you didn’t think I was a decent person back a couple nights ago?” Draco demanded.

   “That’s before you were you! I only knew half of the story!”

   “You only knew half of the story before this and it was the shitty side!” Draco pointed out a little desperately. What was he even arguing for here? All Draco wanted to do was go home, curl up in a little ball, and forget Potter ever existed. “I’m not a bully.” Draco stopped Harry from interjecting. “Alright, I was a bully in the past. Are you happy now? I haven’t even spoken to Granger or her boyfriend all year and I’ve only seen you in health and chemistry.”

   Harry shook his head. “No, I’m not happy now. That’s maybe the last thing I could possibly even be right now. You’ve never apologized, Malfoy. Ron apologized about the things he said to you.”

   Draco rolled his eyes so hard that for a moment he thought they would just stay up there forever. “You still haven’t, you know.”

   “What do I have to be sorry for?”

   “You switch,” Draco said, eyes flicking to Harry’s with a disturbed endpoint already in sight. “Between wanting to climb me like a rock wall and thinking I’m some moral atrocity. You only see things in black and white, Potter, and you’re constantly either putting me on some sex pedestal or condemning me as the worst scum you’ve ever met.”

   Harry had never thought of it like that. If he wanked off thinking about Malfoy and then went back to hating him, did it really not hurt Draco?

   “I can’t do this right now,” Harry muttered, shutting down like someone had pressed his power button. “I need to go home.”

   “Right when I start winning the argument? That is so typical of you.”

   “This isn’t an argument,” Harry told Draco seriously. As far as Harry was concerned, he’d been built up, broken down, and hurt enough for one evening. “I just don’t want to do this.”

   Draco stepped closer to him. “I knew you couldn’t handle the truth. You fuck me up just as much as I fuck you up, Potter. Your hands aren’t clean in this.”

   Well, if it helped, nothing of Harry’s felt clean. “I’m leaving,” he said weakly. “I need to be alone right now. And no—I’m not going to tell anyone what happened here.” Why did Harry feel so guilty? Why was guilt a similar sensation to needing to throw up?

   “Fine.” Draco backed down considerably, watching the spark fade from Harry’s eyes. He couldn’t kick the man while he was down. “Then go.”

   Something about Draco telling Harry that made both of their hearts clench tightly in their chests. Harry tried his best to ignore the sensation as he stormed out, and he blamed the wetness on his cheeks on the cold wind.

XxXxX

   Draco turned the iPhone over in his hand, inspecting each crack and chip out of the side. Could Potter really not afford to put the damn thing in a case?

   He’d run off in such a rush that he’d forgotten all about his precious phone, as beat up as it was.

   For the fortieth time, Draco closed and reopened the Google Chrome window on his laptop. It was the Apple Store home, and it was really a pity that Harry still had the iPhone 3 when the 5th generation was out. He pressed the express shipping button and requested a contacts transfer without even thinking about it.

   “Draco?”

   “Busy, father,” Draco told him through the door, wondering if he could take the purchase back.

   Lucius knew that tone of voice. That lost, distant sound and the sadness in Draco’s words. “I’m coming in,” he told Draco. When there was no objection, Lucius entered.

   He saw Draco cross-legged on the bed in his pyjamas, eyes distinctly red in the harsh glow of the computer screen.

   “Draco, turn that thing off.”

   Draco, oddly enough, complied.

   Lucius frowned and turned a light on. Why was Draco always keeping it so dark in his room? After that, he closed the door behind himself and made a beeline for the bed to get a closer look at Draco. “What’s wrong? Who did this? I’ll sue them, we’ll get our money’s worth, we’ll get them kicked out of whatever University they apply to—“

   “Father,” Draco half-laughed half-rebuked. “No.”

   If threats didn’t make his son happy, what could Lucius do? It was an honest question.

   Narcissa was always telling him to listen to Draco, hear him out. But Draco wasn’t talking, and that was maybe because Lucius hadn’t given him a chance to talk. “What’s wrong?” he asked again, letting the question stand alone.

   Draco shook his head. How could he ever explain this to his father? “It’s nothing. I’ll get over it. Please, don’t be worried.”

   “Alright,” Lucius shrugged as he feigned apathy and took a spot next to Draco in the bed lying at his side. “I can wait.”

   “What?”

   “I can wait until you decide to tell me.”

   Draco looked down at his father—blonde hair fading with age, crinkles forming around his eyes—and tried not to get his hopes up. “It’s about a boy.” Usually, that would have Lucius running off to go ‘do some work’ or ‘graph some progress’ in his office.

   It would be a lie to say Lucius didn’t have that urge. A part of him still didn’t want to hear it and would much rather hide than face the truth, but a bigger part of him knew he had to be a guiding hand in Draco’s life. He was his father.

   “Who is this boy?” Lucius tried.

   “You know, that’s the problem,” Draco laughed sardonically as he toyed with the fringe of his pyjama pants. “He’s not who I expected him to be.”

   Lucius didn’t really know how to interpret that. His son should certainly have high standards, but his son had also never had a boyfriend. Draco had never gone through the rite of passage that was Teenage Love that could prepare him for later in life. How was Draco supposed to know his type in college?

   Lucius hoped his type would be studious, respectful, rich, and obedient, but he understood that Draco could have some other ideas regarding that. “Then what’s he like?” Lucius tried, sitting up in the bed after that ridiculous stunt of lying down. If anyone outside of that room knew what he would do for his son, Lucius would have to kill them.

   “He’s…” Draco thought hard about it. “I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s like or who he is.”

   “He probably doesn’t either,” Lucius pointed out.

   “But he likes to think he knows what I’m like and who I am.”

   “Draco,” Lucius sighed, one hand on his son’s shoulder. “It’s unfortunate that I have to be the one to tell you this, but here goes: Teenage boys are boneheads. Teenage girls? They’ve matured faster and usually have some semblance of self-control. Teenage boys? It’s all one big mess.”

   “So you’d rather me date a girl,” Draco got out of that.

   “What? No! That’s not it—Draco, that’s not it at all.” This wasn’t coming out right, but Lucius kept trying for his son. “What I’m trying to say is that men your age like to label things and be done with them. He has a preconceived notion of who you are—admittedly based on past behavior—and it scares him that it’s changing.”

   “That… That’s really wise, dad.” Draco was shocked. Where had that come from? Had Lucius had all this pent-up dating advice and was letting it free when Draco needed it the most? “But I don’t think he likes me and I don’t even know if I like him anymore. It’s all in this weird limbo.”

   Lucius had been through his fair share of ‘weird limbos’. “Then you know what?”

   “What?”

   “I’m sure that phone you just bought him will at least be a conversation piece when you see him next.”

   “Father!” Draco’s face turned red this time. “How did you—? Oh, please don’t tell me you’re getting updates on everything I buy with the platinum card. I can use it how I want!”

   Lucius chuckled, shaking his head. “What did you do, break his phone in a fight?”

   “Don’t change the subject! You’re stalking my payments!”

   “Next time just try scratching up his car,” Lucius sighed in a slight exhaustion. “Then there’s no proof it was you, but now there are fingerprints on his old phone...”

   Draco, a whole world of bickering left within him, would not let his point go. Father and son would argue about entirely different things into the dead of night, just as every Malfoy father and son before them, but the next morning Draco would wake up early to catch the mail.

   It was an express delivery which was a hundred pounds extra to deliver on a Sunday (as there is, of course, no post on Sundays), but the second he had the shiny new phone in his hand he knew what he was going to do. Harry wouldn’t have any doubt about who Draco was after this.


	7. Draco Malfoy is a Nerd

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are the actual best readers a gal could ask for. This is the second-to-last chapter!

**Chapter 7: Draco Malfoy is a Nerd**

   Rather than entertaining yet another ‘are you sure’ conversation with Theo, Draco got up from his lunch table without another word.

   Only his ‘brother’ knew who the mystery man online had turned out to be, while Pansy, Blaise, Greg, and Vince were in the dark. Draco didn’t have the time or the patience to explain what was going on to them and honestly, Theo was the least judgmental of Draco’s inner circle.

   The bastard did grab the opportunity to finally get to laugh at Draco for the boy who he liked and cracked jokes for a solid five minutes on that Sunday morning, but that was the extent of Theo’s wrath and it hardly even spilled over into the Monday.

   He was a huge softie in hiding.

   Draco left him and their gossiping, chattering friends behind with a brand-new phone in his hand. He’d even bought Harry a case a little while later—no point in getting him an upgrade if Harry was going to be careless and scratch it—with the Alliance insignia from World of Warcraft on it.

   On the other side of the cafeteria, Harry was doing some math homework at his lunch table while Neville kept him company. Hermione and Ron were busy on the lunch line while Harry had packed, so he ate his peanut butter and jelly sandwich while they stuck waiting for the trusty school cardboard pizza.

   Harry was so absorbed in his work and avoiding the footsteps that were definitely coming his way that when Neville gave him a hard poke in the side Harry almost didn’t feel it.

   “One shake. I’m graphing.”

   “Harry,” Neville pressed on. “Someone’s here to see you.”

   Harry looked up to Draco. He’d already heard his distinctive gait across the cafeteria without Neville needing to mention it.

   “I know,” Harry muttered, glasses smudged enough to mistake the iPhone 5 in Draco’s hand for a 3rd generation. “I left my phone. It was stupid. Thanks for being a decent enough person to bring it back.” Harry outstretched his hand to claim it and hoped Draco would leave him alone after that.

   When Draco placed the phone in his hand it was distinctly heavier. And was that…? Was that an Alliance Blue Limited Edition Case?

   “So now I’m a decent person?” Draco asked with a grin.

   Neville was caught between Draco and a hard place, uncomfortably eating his food yet still ready to pounce if Draco insulted Harry in any way.

   Harry frowned. “This isn’t my phone.”

   “Yes it is. Turn it on.”

   Harry pressed the power button to reveal his custom wallpaper, just like the old one had. He swiped the screen in confusion and proceeded to check his photos, his contacts, and apps. Not only were there new apps and the upgraded version of the World of Warcraft Authenticator (downloading that app gave you a free vanity pet in the game!) but the phone had one more contact in it than Harry remembered.

   “What?” Harry asked, beyond confused. The phone was straight out of the packaging with the upgraded camera features. This may have been his memory and information, but it wasn’t his literal phone.

   “Aren’t you going to thank me?”

   “What?”

   “For returning your phone.”

   “This isn’t my phone,” Harry said again, completely and utterly oblivious to Draco’s attempt at a good deed.

   Neville gave Draco a look. “If he says it’s not his phone—“

   “It’s his phone,” Draco snapped at the other man intruding on the moment he was trying to have. It was too late to wonder if Harry would even accept the damn thing, and far too late for Draco to worry about looking like an idiot.

   Finally, it all clicked in Harry’s head. “Wait, you didn’t—? I can’t accept this.” Harry turned to Draco in a mix of shock and awe. The gorgeous man had given him a gift. The stuck-up bully had given him a gift.

   No, no. The person that Harry really did know near nothing about had given him a gift.

   “Too bad,” Draco shrugged. “Because you’re accepting it. What am I going to do with another one?”

   Harry was dumbfounded. He’d expected Draco to tell the whole school some twisted version of their encounter that made Harry look like a monster. He’d prepared insults and everything! Still, he was going to have a hard time trusting this gift. What if there was some kind of tracking device on it or something?

   “I don’t think I can accept something this expensive,” Harry reiterated.

   Draco rolled his eyes. “You know, you’re such a self-sacrificing twat sometimes,” he sighed before getting back on track. “And you had a point, the other night. A few points.” Draco didn’t want to go into them in front of Longbottom, who had resigned himself to shoving fries in his mouth and watching Draco and Harry like they were a movie and he was hanging on to every bit of dramatic dialogue.

   “And you,” Harry responded after a long moment of continued distrust. He’d had all of Sunday to sit around the Dursley’s and think of how he’d treated Draco unfairly. “You had points. You have points. And you’re not—You’re not the only one at fault.”

   Draco basked in his rightness and sheer correctness for a moment before speaking again. “And neither are you.”

   That was… Actually nice. “Thank you,” he said to Draco sincerely. “For returning my phone.” In that moment it also clicked in Harry’s mind that the phone was the spoiled rich boy way of saying ‘sorry’ without actually saying it out loud.

   Harry would need an actual apology to get this going.

   “Any time,” Draco said smoothly as he tried to read the expression on Harry’s face.

   “Malfoy, are you trying to flirt?” Neville asked once he’d swallowed his mouthful of fries. “Harry, I thought you hated him.”

   Harry’s face heated up when he remembered Neville Longbottom was the third wheel in this exchange. “Uhm, so did I. It’s complicated. Not now, alright?” he directed at Neville quietly before turning back to Draco. “I’ll see you around? I kind of want to talk to you later.”

   “You better ‘see me around’,” Draco scoffed once he understood the ‘talk to you later’ was a polite way for Harry to want to get Draco in private. “Don’t think I’m letting you get out of that Black Temple run you promised me. I’m getting the Warglaives of Azzinoth if it kills me and you can’t do a thing about it.”

   “You’re a caster,” Harry reminded him with a boisterous laugh that came so easily it scared him. “What in the hell are you going to do with warglaives?”

   Draco pretended to think about it for a while. “Look better than you, probably.”

   “Who _are_ you?” Harry laughed again. The question came out a bit more seriously than he intended, but he’d just never seen this side of Draco in person, only online.

   It was beyond scary—it was terrifying.

   Draco used semicolons online. Draco feigned a gay lisp when he talked about things that he found silly and wanted to make fun of. Draco thought dragon dicks were the height of comedy and owned gaming-themed clothes.

   Finally, it dawned on Harry.

   “You’re… You’re a complete nerd! Draco Malfoy is a _nerd_.”

   “Hush!” Draco swatted Harry’s shoulder and looked around to make sure nobody had heard that ridiculous little outburst. “If you ever say that in public again I hunt you down. I know where you live, and I prefer the term ‘enthusiast’.”

   “Okay, okay. Draco Malfoy is an enthusiast. That better?”

   “Much better.”

   “Malfoy?” Ron went in for the attack the second he arrived back at his table with Hermione at his side. “What the hell are you doing here?”

   “I think he’s returning Harry’s phone after a night of weird sex. I’m really not sure what’s going on,” Neville lamented. He was always out of the loop.

   Draco couldn’t even keep his laugh in at that one. “What Longbottom said,” he chuckled before beginning the trek back to his own clique with their familiar table and bitching. That had actually gone better than expected, and Draco had seemed to catch Harry off-guard and get him in hot water with his friends. It was a petty scrap of revenge that he just couldn’t help but let sit.

   Just because he fancied parts of Harry didn’t mean he stopped despising the others that happened to include Granger and Weasel and the part that had made Harry run out of that damn café.

   In the Malfoy family, nobody ran away during arguments. You were trapped there until the bitter end, fighting tooth and nail to get your point across. Harry and Draco did that quite a bit, too, and it had been a shock to see Harry reach a breaking point.

   As he sat back down and looked up to see Harry trying to explain what was going on with wild hand gestures to Ron and Hermione assuring them he was still sane and very much a virgin, Draco wondered what other shocking things he’d learn from Harry.

XxXxX

   Harry figured it was his turn to contact Draco first when he saw his name pop up on his social list online.

   Harry had been in the middle of some pet battling when he heard the little ping that the game used to signal a friend was online.

   A _friend_. That was an interesting term for Draco Malfoy.

   Harry ordered his baby alligator to dive in for the kill while the enemy pet was bleeding so he could get it over with sooner. When he had collected his winnings, Harry finally worked up the nerve to send a whisper.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Hey.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: Ah, right on time. Get to the Shadowmoon Valley and meet me at the Black Temple entrance.**

   Harry summoned his battle-gryphon and began the flight there even though something felt off about having voiced his problems with Draco and gotten no response.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: How are you acting so casually about this?**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: About what? You said what you needed to, I said what I needed to, and now we’re on our way to slaughter some Illdari.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: I don’t think I can move on that fast. I don’t think anyone can.**

   Draco sighed. He was already waiting at the Temple entrance for Harry and had intended to make this a quick run. Harry seemed to have on hell of a thick skull when it came to things like this.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: You were kind of awful to me. For many years.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: And you dished it out just as well.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: I mean, that’s true, but something feels wrong.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Wait, I think I know what I need.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: Some headphones to go with the phone?**

   Harry rolled his eyes.

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: No. I can’t be bought, Draco. What you did was really nice and I am grateful for the phone, but that doesn’t magically fix things.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: Fine. Then what do you need?**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: An apology.**

   “The fuck,” Draco murmured to himself. Malfoys rarely apologized, and almost never apologized to people outside of the family. It felt sacrilegious to fulfill that wish of Harry’s.

**Dragonis has invited you to a group. Accept?**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Draco.**

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: What? You’re literally in targeting range of me. Of course I was going to form a party.**

**[Whisper][Worgasm]: Apologize and I’ll apologize to you, too.**

   With a huff, Draco squirmed around in his sheets to try and find some more physical comfort where he wasn’t getting any emotionally. He was out in the open in front of Harry with no armor or weapons.

**[Whisper][Dragonis]: I’m sorry for the way I treated you.**

**Worgasm has accepted the invitation.**

**[Party][Worgasm]: And I’m sorry for the way I treated you, too.**

**[Party][Dragonis]: Can we skip this gay shit and start killing things now? The wing of this raid that’s filled with Illidan’s consorts is my second favorite prostitute-killing zone.**

**[Party][Worgasm]: Oh, well, if it’s your second favorite then I must apologize from keeping you from it. Accept my sincere and humble apologies.**

   Harry cracked a smile. There was that banter.

**[Party][Dragonis]: Maybe. You’ll have to make it up to me somehow. Probably by going out to eat with me tomorrow night.**

**[Party][Worgasm]: Wow. That sounds massively torturous. You’re a cruel man who drives a hard bargain.**

**[Party][Dragonis]: I was under the distinct impression you liked a bit of torture.**

**[Party][Worgasm]: I didn’t say ‘no’.**

**[Party][Dragonis]: Then let’s kick some arse?**

**[Party][Worgasm]: Let’s.**

   They stormed the Temple with an unmatched might. Harry and Draco not only killed the wing of the raid filled with bed servants, but they made it all the way to Illidan Stomrage himself to get those warglaives Draco had been looking for.

   Halfway through the raid, Harry realized something that was sort of life-changing.

   Of course he and Draco didn’t actually have magical powers or grand, magnificent destinies that involved conquering strange new lands or heading armies, but that was kind of okay.

   It wasn’t the magic itself that made World of Warcraft so great. Sure, it was fun and had one hell of a plotline, but that wasn’t all there was to it. Harry could run the Black Temple raid all on his own. He was level 90 and he didn’t need to have Draco there to take down Illidan, but he wanted to have him there.

   The World was amazing all on its own, but it was a tinge more special with Draco around. Harry would just have to see if that applied to the real world, too.


	8. Heroes of Azeroth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, just kidding. THIS is the second-to-last chapter. I had a plot bunny wander into my head and it must come to life.

**Chapter 8: Heroes of Azeroth**

   With a smile and a polite ‘thank you’, Harry accepted the slice of chocolate lava cake he and Draco had agreed to split as their dessert. The waitress refilled their drinks as well before leaving the couple alone at their booth in a restaurant that Harry had only seen from the outside before.

   It wasn’t that the restaurant was terribly expensive; it was just that Harry had never had someone to go into a joint with (admittedly fake) red-candle chandeliers above the tables.

   “I thought I was too full to keep eating, but I was so wrong,” Harry sighed happily as he grabbed his fork and dug into the cocoa confection.

   “I am so surprised that you’re not fat,” Draco told him as he started on his own half of the slice. “Have your aunt and uncle not been feeding you or something?”

   Harry shook his head. “They’re not feeding me. I’m being starved out,” he joked. “All the food goes to Dudley.”

   “That explains so much.”

   “You’re mean,” Harry snickered. “But so is Dudley, so I suppose I can live with that.”

   “I can’t believe all those stories were about him. I’m going to have to arrange to have him beaten up now, you realize,” Draco drawled. He liked Harry and was therefore the only one allowed to be mean around him.

   With a roll of his eyes, Harry couldn’t help but smile. “Don’t. I’d only have to watch his parents fawn over him more than they already do and I may become sick at the sight of it.”

   “Well. We couldn’t have that.”

   “You know what I can’t believe?”

   Draco could think of a few things. “How beautiful I am? How you somehow got me to like you? That I have such questionable taste in men?”

   “Prat,” Harry scoffed before continuing. “I can’t believe that all the stories about your worrying parents were about, well, _your_ parents. I’ve really only seen them at school functions when they’re primed to pounce on unsuspecting students that may have wronged their son.”

   “They’re protective,” Draco understated massively.

   “Protective? They’re bears guarding their cub.”

   Draco laughed. “Yes, yes. Father has a tendency to get in people’s faces and mother has a tendency to ruin the reputations of teachers I dislike. You wouldn’t believe what they do to my dates. Background checks, fingerprinting, surveillance…”

   “ _What_?”

   “That was a joke,” he smirked. “Though father will definitely try to scare you off.”

   “I’m meeting your parents?” It sounded strange to say out loud since they had met many times before and had consistently sour encounters. Harry went on anyway.

   “Not tonight, don’t look so worried,” Draco grinned. “But my family’s approval is important to me. It’s not a deciding factor in anything, but it’d be nice to have. All they want is the best for me even when they do go about it in a completely backwards way.”

   Harry forked another bit of cake into his mouth before speaking. “That’s… Really sweet.”

   “Yeah, yeah. Blood’s thicker than water and all that bullshit. Let’s not spend any more time thinking about my parents, hm? It kills the mood,” Draco refocused. “Now tell me something about yourself that I don’t know.”

   There were a lot of aspects of Harry’s life that Draco knew from sharing it with him online. He knew Harry’s sob story, his sexual kinks, and his attitude towards life in general. Finally, Harry came up with something. “There’s this owl that hangs out outside of my house. She’s snowy white and likes it when I give her cheese, and I have been caught speaking to her as if she were a person.”

   “You’re out of your mind,” Draco said with a big, goofy smile. “What’s her name?”

   “Hedwig.”

   “Why Hedwig?”

   Harry had an even more ridiculous answer for that. “It’s what my night elf hunter’s pet is name in the game when I randomized it, and the name stuck with the real owl,” he told Draco. “Now, you tell me something I don’t know about you.”

   Draco had to think about this one, too. He made the most adorable face when he focused hard on something, and Harry had no problem watching him think.

   “Pansy once convinced me to dress in drag,” Draco informed him with a strange sense of pride. “She had to convince me to get out of it once she realized I looked better than her.”

   That was a shock. “Please tell me you at least have pictures,” Harry grinned. He’d never had the means to masquerade as a woman himself and sometimes liked to wonder what it would be like to wear some kitten heels and a corset.

   “I do,” Draco nodded with his airy voice. “But you’re going to have to earn those pictures.”

   “I shouldn’t have expected anything different.”

   Draco smirked. Harry really did seem to know that part of Draco like the back of his hand. “Exactly.” Before Harry could get to it, Draco scooped up the last bit of chocolate cake from their dessert plate.

   The waitress had been watching to see when they finished and was eager to get the two foul-mouthed boys who seemed to be playing footsie under the table out of the sight of the rest of the customers.

   Yet when she approached the table, she had no idea who to hand to the check to. How did that work with two men? Thankfully, the blonde one snatched up the check before she could stand there a minute longer as a clueless heterosexual.

   “Here,” Harry said, digging in his pocket as the waitress walked away looking dazed.

   “Don’t. I’ve got it.”

   Harry shook his head. “No, we’ll split it.”

   “I’ve got it,” Draco said before signing the paper and attaching his platinum card to the leather case. It was much neater than Harry’s wad of crumbled up pounds. “You work for your money, Harry. You slave away and sell condoms to straight people and pills to crazy people.”

   At the reference to the pharmacy at which Harry worked, he shuddered slightly. Oh, the long hours behind the counter scanning ointments and all other sorts of personal items for sale. “But still. That’s what I work for there. To pay for things.”

   “Quit worrying about money. Money is so massively unimportant in the long-run.”

   “That’s easy for you to say, yeah,” Harry retorted. “You’ve got enough money to buy all of London.”

   Draco nodded, brimming with pride. “Exactly.”

   “I think you’re missing the point.”

   “No,” Draco sighed. “You are. The point is that I have lots of money and there’s no point in sitting on it. You can’t take money to the grave and that’s something my parents haven’t figured out yet, and it’s rather depressing to watch. I am using my money the way I want to as a gift.”

   “I’m not used to getting gifts,” Harry grumbled. “I guess money just makes me feel uncomfortable. The only place where I’m rich is in the game.”

   Draco reached across the table to squeeze Harry’s hand. “Think of it as a sign of affection.”

   “It’s still weird.”

   “A weird sign of affection, then.” After watching the waitress swipe his card, Draco threw in another assurance. “You’ll get used to it.”

   It was exciting and new, just like Harry had wished for in meeting the ‘mystery man’ that was Dragonis.  Harry figured he couldn’t complain that this was the surprise instead of a third eye or bad breath.

   They stepped out of the restaurant and Harry hoped the latter wasn’t true, because Draco was looking fantastic that night in spite of his bothersome riches that made him so arrogant.

   Still, the happy surprises outweighed the bad ones. Draco made him laugh and they never seemed to run out of things to talk about together.

   “So, plan to take me on a Gondola ride to Italy or give me diamond earrings next?” Harry asked as they walked side-by-side down the sidewalk with no real destination in mind.

   Draco snorted. “I was thinking more along the lines of a pearl necklace for you.”

   “How sweet.”

   Their knuckles brushed together between them as they walked, and Harry wondered if that meant they were supposed to hold hands. Much to his own disgust, he wanted to hold Draco Malfoy’s hand. Draco had thrown his money around and given Harry that cocky smile and all it made Harry want to do was hold his hand.

   Teenage romance was unbelievable.

   Correction: teenage romance with Draco Malfoy was unbelievable. Other teens probably just made goo-goo eyes at one another and dry-humped while Harry was caught between wanting to throw up and wanting to yank Draco on top of him and kiss him senseless.

   While Harry was busy sulking about how insane his life had become because of a man in a video game, Draco was trying to figure out what was on his mind. All he knew was that Harry looked displeased.

   “You can pay for the next one if it really gets you so bothered,” Draco sighed. All he’d been trying to do was express fondness in the way his parents taught him to.

   “What?” Harry didn’t even realize what he was talking about for a second, and stopped mid-stride before manning up and grabbing Draco’s hand. “No, that’s not it. I mean, yes, I would like to pay next time, but that’s not it.”

   Harry had said there would be a next time, so Draco listened keenly for whatever nonsense was about to follow his rambling. “Then what is it?”

   “It’s not a bad thing,” he assured Draco quickly. Draco must’ve not known how vulnerable he looked in that moment or Harry was sure the Great Malfoy would be turning away and hiding his face. “I was thinking about holding hands with you,” Harry admitted.

   With a laugh, Draco shook his head. “You’re a complete madman, but mission accomplished I suppose.” He squeezed Harry’s hand in his under the street lamp. Nobody seemed to be on that quiet corner of the city that night but the two of them in their circle of light.

   There was something oddly magic about that; like they were agents of some noble resistance planning their next move in the dark while they drew closer and closer together. They could have been two vampires hunting for prey, two werewolves waiting for the moon to turn, or really anything out of the ordinary because of the scenery.

   But they weren’t.

   “What are you thinking about now?” Draco asked when Harry’s eyes clearly were focusing on something else.

_No. Get it together, Potter. None of that is real. He’s real._ “Coups to overthrow the government,” Harry at least answered honestly.

   “Of course.”

   “And you a bit more.”

   “What a surprise,” Draco said flatly.

   Harry let out a quick huff of air. “You’re so full of yourself.”

   “You’re only jealous because you’re not full of me.”

   “Okay, I opened myself up for that one.”

   “Mm, so that’s what you’d do?” Draco grinned lecherously. The whole thing was a wildly hilarious joke to him when Harry started to blush in front of him rather than miles away from him.

   “Do you think of anything other than sex?” Harry questioned sincerely, pushing past the embarrassment to keep their repartee going.

   “Says the bloke whose main character on World of Warcraft is only one letter away from ‘orgasm’.” Draco rested his back confidently against the building they’d happened upon. It was some closed Real Estate place with brick walls that were cold to the touch even with Draco’s many layers of clothes on. “And for your information, I think about many things aside from sex.”

   “Right, right. I forgot about your scholarly pursuit of learning dead languages and solving impossible equations,” Harry teased.

   Draco nodded as if that were actually the truth, playing along. “Yes, yes. It’s incredibly hard but someone has to do it. I do it for the children.”

   “You hate children.”

   “You’ve got me there. I do it for the kittens.”

   Harry had never heard Draco complain about cats—though he’d complained about almost every other walk of life—so that seemed like a safe motive even if any of the situation were true. “My hero,” Harry joked.

   “I have defeated the Thunder King and saved thousands of Pandaren from a lifetime of servitude and soul-shredding,” Draco referenced.

   “Right,” he laughed. Most people by the end of that month could say the same thing, but Draco did it unabashedly as if he were the only one to ever accomplish a successful Throne of Thunder raid.

   Since Draco had been the one who pursued Harry for the date, he decided his kindness ended there and the other man would simply have to come to him if he wanted anything more. Draco didn’t like work; he liked watching men work for him. Half-hard. In heels. This was getting off-subject.

   Harry—oh, how appetizing he’d look in some stockings—somehow understood that shift; that it was time to go after what he wanted and prove he wanted it in the first place.

   “I like you,” Harry murmured, taking a step closer.

   “That is generally why people go on dates, yes,” Draco urged him on.

   Harry wasn’t sure what he was getting at but kept taking stabs in the dark anyway. “You’re also gorgeous.”

   “Getting warmer…” Draco grinned, still resting against the brick wall.

   “You’re really good at Warcraft?”

   “Do you not get that I’m trying to get you to kiss me? Fuck, no wonder you’re a virgin. You probably have had men stripping for you and falling at your feet and even then you’d just stand there and—“

   Harry cut Draco off with one hand curled around his neck and his lips pressed firmly to his. Draco’s breath was warm on the cold wintery night; it made Harry feel like he was kissing a firecracker.

   In response, Draco reeled Harry in closer to taste those soft, pink lips of his. Harry tasted like chocolate, which really only further encouraged Draco to give him a swish of his tongue along Harry’s bottom lip.

   An embarrassing sort of noise escaped Harry’s throat and for a moment he thought Draco was going to pull back and make fun of him, but he didn’t.

   Instead he kept kissing him, allowing Harry’s mouth to ease open so Draco’s could ravage him entirely.

   The warm, glowing sensation was unparalleled. Screw being a resistance leader, a vampire, a wolf, a hero, or anything else if that was what being an average bloke snogging Draco Malfoy felt like.

   Just to be sure it was the most enjoyable sensation Harry had every encountered, he was sure to keep Draco there with ragged breaths and sloppy kisses until he reached a conclusion.


	9. Prom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this little story. :) Thanks so much for coming along with me on it and I hope you enjoy the ending! Prom time, woo!

**Chapter 9: Prom**

   If looks could kill, Harry Potter would be a dead man ten thousand times over.

   Draco—that bastard, even when he was dressed to the nines he still found a way to infuriate Harry—had left Harry’s side for a brief moment at the Malfoy estate after their pre-prom photo-op and had left Harry vulnerable in the line of fire.

   Lucius Malfoy, never one to miss an opportunity to scare the living daylights out of a man who had the misfortune of courting his son, turned his deadly glare on Harry into a sermon.

   “Potter,” Lucius greeted him curtly.

   Harry immediately looked to Draco for help, but he seemed to be absorbed in whatever pictures Colin was showing him with his high-definition camera. Dammit. They’d done the whole corsage prom picture deal at the steps and taken at least a hundred photos that Harry was blinking in half of. Narcissa’s family camera had one hell of a flash, which Harry suspected to be on purpose. “Uh.”

   “Oh, silly Potter. Eyes over here.”

   The threatening growl in Lucius’ voice made Harry snap back to him. “Er. Yes, Mr. Malfoy. Yes sir.”

   Lucius’ smile after that was positively sinister. “You’re out of my son’s league,” he informed Harry plainly. “You’re most likely a rebellious trick he’s playing on me because the AIDS center he volunteers at gave him the night off after I… _persuaded_ them to free up his schedule.”

   Harry had a strong feeling that Lucius’ brand of ‘persuasion’ was definitely terrifying and life-altering. He played it safe and minimal like being a rogue in WoW taught him. “Okay.”

   “Don’t you ‘okay’ me,” Lucius snapped. Theo and Colin had resumed taking pictures that would adorn their Facebook walls for the next few weeks and Draco was talking party decorations with his mother, who seemed to be purposefully turning a blind eye to what her husband was doing.

   “Listen closely, Potter. There are some rules for young men who try and date my son.” Lucius had a veritable list hidden somewhere in Narcissa and his room. “You do not touch him. You do not so much as _breathe_ on him. If I hear of one misstep, if I see one picture of you at the dance trying to cop a feel or whatever brainless boys like you think they can do, or if he is not in this very spot by midnight, you will incur my wrath.”

   “Don’t worry, he’ll be home by eleven—“

   “I wasn’t finished.”

   That snip knocked some sense into Harry. Lucius hadn’t even described what his ‘wrath’ would be and Harry knew it would involve knives, rabid dogs, and permanent scars. He finally shut up.

   “This is a one-time occurrence. I’m sure Draco will be bored of you after one night, and you don’t concern me, but his safety concerns me. The fact that you’re both men puts you at a risk,” Lucius pressed on even though Harry could definitely tell this special brand of anger wasn’t directed at him but at the world that would dare to harm his son. “Anyone gives you any trouble, if it looks as if you’re being followed, or if someone tries to get you to leave the dance because of that fact, you call me. Draco has my number.” He sighed. “Don’t be a hero, Potter.”

   That was actually sort of sweet? Harry nodded to show he understood.

   “Satisfactory,” Lucius grumbled.

   “Father,” Draco called to him, looking out the window to their driveway. “The limo’s here, you can stop harassing Harry now.”

   “Oh, Draco. I’ll never really stop harassing Potter.”

   “Wonderful,” Harry mumbled. The only actual wonderful thing about that moment was the fancy stretch limo—with a full mini-fridge of alcohol inside—was there to whisk them away from what had to be the most uncomfortable moment of Harry’s life.

   Narcissa fawned over Draco some more, kissing his cheeks and Theo’s too.

   “Mum. Mum. We have to go. Mum,” Draco whined, trying to wrench away from the lipstick marks on his cheeks. “Mum!”

   Always the doting mother, Narcissa pulled out a moist toilette and wiped the red from Draco’s face. “Stay safe, sweetheart. Have fun,” she told him fondly before fixing one more strand of his hair.

   “Yes, mum,” Draco said a bit more fondly before giving her one quick kiss on the cheek. Harry wondered what it would be like to be a part of a family that kissed each other goodbye and meant it when they said ‘goodnight’.

   Harry thought about that on the limo ride over to the hotel that hosted their dance, fading in and out of the conversation as they picked up Pansy and her date, Blaise and his date, and Crabbe and Goyle who had decided to go stag but Harry suspected were going to give in and snog each other after a few brews.

   Parkinson raided the mini-fridge and passed around bottles for everyone, but Harry hadn’t touched his and smiled when he realized Draco hadn’t, either. Harry sort of wanted to remember his prom night.

   “So Potter,” she went on once her lips were loosened by alcohol. “You’re quite the smooth operator online for someone so horribly awkward in person.”

   “I can see why Draco likes you lot. You’re all so sweet,” Harry responded with a smile.

   Theo at least got an obnoxious laugh out of that one. “They’re a tough crowd,” he nodded understandingly to Harry. At least one of Draco’s friends wasn’t completely insane. “But you survived Lucius’ warnings and will probably survive his inspection later tonight when we come home, so I think you can deal with these liquored up twats.”

   “Not a twat,” Pansy corrected him, eyes wide. “A Khaleesi.”

   A laugh burst out of Harry. “Of course, Your Grace.” It made sense that Pansy would watch HBO, actually.

   “Watch it,” Colin warned him from Theo’s side. He’d been enamored with the glamor of their ride up until the moment he realized he needed to help a friend in need. “You don’t want to inflate her ego any more than necessary. And the rest of ‘em are just hazing you.”

   “Lovely,” Harry nodded. While he couldn’t give Draco a ‘meet the guardians’ moment that was anywhere near as intimidating as Harry’s, his friends would at least be doing the same to Draco. Both cliques had a natural distrust of one another after years of butting heads.

   But for that moment, Draco and Harry simply nudged their knees together in the back seat of the limousine.

   The rest of the night went along with that plan. Ron threatened to ‘punch Draco’s sorry-arse lights out’ if he did anything to Harry and Hermione gave him the evil eye for the evening, even when Draco and Harry seemed to be laughing, talking, and having a good time.

   Draco’s friends got drunk, Harry’s friends looked like they had finally discovered mirrors, and everything went along as Harry imagined it would. It was chillingly normal. No boss fights, no shocking coups, and not even an upset when the prom king and queen were selected.

   Of course Dean and Seamus were going to win, they were one of the only semi-functional couples in the school. Dean took the tiara and wore it upside-down while Seamus carried the crown around.

   There had even been straight dry-humping as Draco had expected.

   “Look at them,” Draco marveled, looking out onto the hotel’s finished and polished dance floor being desecrated by a sexual smorgasbord of epically heteronormative proportions. “It’s like they were born to do this.”

   Girls grinded back on their dates, avoiding eye contact entirely as they both swayed to the beat with her arse pressed up against his stiffy. A hundred carbon copies of that exact situation unfolded all around Draco and Harry, who had consequently fled to the dinner tables.

   At least Ron and Hermione had decided to take a stroll around the hotel so Harry wouldn’t have to witness them joining in. “Straight people,” Harry shrugged haplessly. “They all look sort of bored, too.”

   “Want to jump in between them and show them how it’s done?” Draco asked with a grin.

   Harry was about to tell him ‘fuck no’ when the song changed from a thumping club beat to a slow song. The straight couples on the floor turned to face one another for the first time in a solid half hour to adjust to the sweet sound of violins and pianos.

   “Well. Too late,” Draco sighed.

   “Nah,” Harry decided. “We could still get in on that.”

   “Confidence rising as the music slows down? That’s a new one.”

   Harry took Draco’s hand in his. “Just avoid any cameras. According to your father I shouldn’t even be breathing on you.”

   “My father is going to have to live with it,” Draco shrugged as he turned the tables to lead Harry to the dance floor.

   Faces of classmates passed them by—Justin, Blaise, Susan, Daphne—as they worked their way to the center. Draco seemed to have an effortless grace that let him slide through people without bumping elbows or tripping over their shoes, a sort of grace that Harry was just glad to ride on the coattails of.

   When Draco decided on a perfect place to begin their dance (even though it was more of a gently swaying hug considering Harry had about zero rhythm), he didn’t hesitate to wrap his arms around Harry’s waist.

   Just like he’d seen in movies, Harry rested his hands on Draco’s shoulders.

   But Draco was better than something out of the movies. He was unpredictable and surprising in almost every aspect of his life that Harry had reexamined after storming out on Draco in that café.

   Harry tried to take it a step further. He rested his cheek on Draco’s shoulder and shut his eyes so he could listen to the music and get more of whatever incredible cologne Draco was wearing.

   “Are you smelling me?”

   Harry shushed him. “Quit ruining the moment.”

   “This is a moment?”

   “Yes, it is, you complete arse,” Harry chuckled, still not opening his eyes or moving away from Draco.

   Draco bit his lower lip when he looked down at the gorgeous man who he was apparently having a moment with. He liked that Harry was shorter than him, it let Draco be the one who felt bigger and like he could protect the other man. His boyfriend.

   Draco was about to let his own eyes shut when a disturbed grunt came from behind them.

   Harry lifted his head and Draco turned around to see the hollow of the man who used to be Severus Snape. “What in the world do you two think you’re doing?”

   “Dancing,” Harry offered.

   Around them, the other slow-dancing couples inched away from the killjoy chaperone.

   “I refused to believe your father when he told me who you were going with,” Snape growled at Draco. “What are you _thinking_?”

   Draco didn’t really know to answer that. If he answered honestly, he was making a list in his head of all the things he liked about his new boyfriend, but something told him Snape didn’t really want to hear it.

   Luckily, Harry had been imparted with the wisdom of Lucius Malfoy earlier that evening.

   He was going to play the gay card, and he was going to play it hard.

   “Wow,” Harry exclaimed so everyone on the floor looked to him. “I cannot believe this. Mr. Snape, are you _homophobic_?”

   The students whose attention Harry had caught looked at their already hated teacher in disgust. “Not cool, man,” a particularly drunk student yelled to the teacher.

   “What?” Snape hadn’t been expecting that one. Draco was his godson, for fuck’s sake. It was actually impossible for him to be homophobic.

   Draco had picked up on Harry’s plan the second he got louder. “Hey!” Draco added. “Are you discriminating, Mr. Snape? That’s against school policy.” Just because Snape was his godfather didn’t mean Draco would spare him the third degree if he tried to pry into Draco’s personal life like his actual father did.

   At the mention of the word ‘discriminating’, Luna Lovegood appeared seemingly out of thin air with her puffy blue dress. “Is he giving you any trouble, Harry? I could always talk with Headmaster Dumbledore.”

   It was only at that moment that Snape could see what was going on. “Oh, no, Lovegood. I could care less if they were hermaphrodites wearing diamonds and pearls. It is their… Combination that bothers me.”

   “Mr. Snape hates hermaphrodites!” another drunken student announced, getting all of the sober kids in a tizzy that stopped their dancing so they could glare down the greasy old man who’d thrown on a suit for the evening. Who was that miserable man to judge anyone’s genitals?

   “No, that’s not—“

   “Is there a problem here, Severus?” Dumbledore’s voice rang calmly and clearly. He’d seen the commotion on the floor from where he’d perched to observe the students with his stalwart friend Minerva McGonagall and perhaps exchange gossip. The topic they’d been discussing before Severus had trudged into teenage wasteland was coincidentally centered on Mr. Potter and Mr. Malfoy.

   “No, Headmaster,” he answered begrudgingly. “You really didn’t have to come over here.”

   In his traditional white tuxedo that he wore to every prom since the beginning of time itself, Albus Dumbledore put a guiding hand on Severus’ shoulder. “Let’s have a discussion elsewhere, Severus.” He nodded a goodbye to the students. “Enjoy the relaxation while you can, everyone. Before you know it you’ll be as old and grey as me.” With a wink, Dumbledore secured himself a spot in the hearts of his students as their favorite albeit quirky principal, and made Draco and Harry’s night.

XxXxX

   “Did you see his _face_?” Harry laughed wildly.

   “I think he made a new shade of white. The whitest of whites,” Draco nodded. “Fuck, if you stared at him too long your retinas would burn.”

   “I already am visually impaired, if you haven’t noticed.”

   Their stroll down the halls was thankfully more private than the dance floor was, and the mocha detailing on the carpets beneath their formal shoes was calming to look at. The dance still raged on in the ballroom five floors below them, but they’d managed to get past hotel security with one flash of Draco’s platinum card. Even after a slow dance, it was sort of evident that Harry was not a dancing kind of man.

   The poor thing had two left feet, and while Draco was just beginning to see his personality he experienced online show through in person, it was still evident he had a tinge of social awkwardness.

   “I noticed,” Draco nodded before doing something mildly evil yet entirely premieditated. He snatched Harry’s glasses right off of his face and inspected them as if they were fascinating. “What’s the strength on these things? They look pretty thick.”

   Harry tried to grab them back but Draco was too fast. On his second attempt, Harry narrowed his eyes and stopped their stroll to reclaim his glasses. “Come on,” he grinned. “I can’t see my prom date without those.”

   “It’s a pity. He’s a looker.” Draco continued to walk, which confused Harry enough to follow him.

   “Where are you going?”

   Draco grinned and kept walking. “I’ve got a surprise for you, and I figured this was less suspicious than wrapping a blindfold around your eyes. Though I could have made some great demonic warlock references.”

   “I’m sure you can still get some in, Draco. Don’t give up so easily,” he laughed before watching Draco stop in front of a door and wave a card in front of the lock. The light on the door turned green, Harry could see that much, before Draco could open it.

   Harry felt his heart beat in his chest. He’d seen this moment in movies, too. It was during prom, Draco had a hotel room, he was surprising him… Harry didn’t know if he was ready for this. Sure, they’d had some more-than innocent talks over the past week, but this was so soon.

   “Uh, Draco,” Harry tried before Draco handed him back his glasses. “I don’t know if this is such a—“

   When Harry had his glasses on his head once again, he really was surprised.

   “Holy shit.”

   “What were you expecting, candles and rose petals?” Draco laughed. “That I was going to get you liquored up and ask you to give it up on prom night?”

   “Yes,” Harry answered honestly before entering the room and all of its perfection.

   Two widescreen televisions occupied the room where beds would be, hooked up to separate keyboards and mice designed for the game. Even the chairs they sat in front of were perfectly curved for relaxing and gaming.

   “Harry,” Draco told him gently before tossing him a bag of Cheetos. “I actually happen to give a fuck about you. I would have gotten a much bigger suite with a Jacuzzi bathtub if I wanted to rock your virgin world.”

   Harry rolled his eyes fondly. He’d definitely seen the hot tub thing in movies. Still, he was relieved it wasn’t so early in the relationship. One day he’d be ready, and being inexperienced didn’t really scare him as much as it used to. Draco gave a fuck about him.

   “So are you or are you not going to kick some Mogu arse with me?”

   “Like you even needed to ask,” Harry grinned, checking the clock. They could get a decent run in before he had to take Draco home, and he would take it for all it was worth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had the worst case of smut-block. Just assume they shagged wildly in a few months after this. Time for thesecreteater’s Wolfstar fic that I promised I’d write forever ago.


End file.
